Review Of Research Suggests Reciprocal Teaching Could Be Best Strategy For Older Readers

Researcher Nathaniel Hansford reviewed 1,500 studies on reading comprehension, and came up with some important conclusions that you can read at My Best Advice for Reading Comprehension.

The most important point for teachers of students in fourth-grade and above seemed to be the value of reciprocal teaching (which I’ve posted about before at New Meta-Analysis Identifies Instructional Strategies To Help Struggling Adolescent Readers.

The “classical” definition of reciprocal teaching is putting students in groups of four to read a text together, and with each one having one of these responsibilities  – predicting, clarifying, questioning and summarizing.

Practically speaking, I’ve never been a fan of reading in a group of four.  Very often, I’d have students divide into pairs to read (perhaps the first three pages of a history textbook or do it as a jigsaw with groups assigned to different pages.).  On a graphic organizer or in their notebook, I’d first ask them to predict what the text was about.  Then, I ask them to take turns reading paragraphs to each other.  At the end of each page, I’d ask them to identify a word that was new to them, write a question they had about the text, and then a one sentence summary of the page.

Then, everyone would come back together, and different students would share with the class.

It generally worked quite well.

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