Informed Strategies for Learning: A program to improve children's reading awareness and comprehension.

Abstract

Children's awareness about their own cognitive skills, or metacognition, has been hypothesized to play a major role in their learning and development. This role was examined in an experimental study of third and fifth graders' reading comprehension. Children from four classrooms were given an experimental curriculum, Informed Strategies for Learning (ISL), that was designed to increase children's awareness and use of effective reading strategies. Children who participated in ISL made larger gains than did children in control classrooms on cloze and error detection tasks. No differences between groups were found on two standardized tests of reading comprehension. This study demonstrates that metacognition can be promoted through direct instruction in classrooms and that increased awareness can lead to better use of reading strategies. Although children learn to read at home and school with many different forms of instruction, most acquire fundamental reading skills within several years. By third or fourth grade children are expected to be able to pick out main ideas in text, to attend to important information more than peripheral details, and to connect ideas from different parts of stories. These skills, among many others, are included in the scope and sequence charts of basal reading series and are repeated throughout elementary grades with more difficult material. Nevertheless, many children do not progress beyond decoding words and do not induce effective comprehension skills (Ryan, 1981). But rather than instructing children how to use strategies to improve comprehension, many teachers simply give poor readers more practice on the worksheets that they have not mastered. Durkin's (1978-1979) classroom observations revealed that intermediate teachers