Rethinking reading comprehension instruction: a comparison of instruction for strategies and content approaches

McKeown, Margaret G., Beck, Isabel L., & Blake, Ronetta G. K. (2009). Rethinking
reading comprehension instruction: a comparison of instruction for strategies and content approaches. Reading Research Quarterly,44(3), 218-253.

So what’s the best way to teach elementary students to comprehend text? Do you focus on the strategies (process approach) or the content itself? This set of two studies makes the case for content. Indeed, the authors make a fairly strong case that instruction focusing on strategies can actually distract students from the content to be comprehended. They suggest more of a “mini-lesson” approach where strategies are taught explicitly and modeled with short texts, then brought up only incidentally during more content focused reading instruction. Wonder what the late Michael Pressley, “guru” of strategies instruction, would have said about this?

One big finding was that interspersed reading and discussion, a hallmark of all three approaches compared here (even the basal “control” condition) may have helped all the groups comprehended better than an instructional routine involving reading and then discussion, as seems to be more frequently seen in schools.