Instruction Of Reading Comprehension: Cognitive Strategies Or Cognitive Engagement

The researchers carried out this three-phase project with second and fourth grade teachers and their classrooms in four school districts serving different populations of students, one of which includes a substantial portion of students whose first language is Spanish. In the first phase, the researchers worked with second and fourth grade teachers to develop and implement teaching strategies using two different approaches. In the first approach, called cognitive strategies, the emphasis is on teaching students to carry out specific operations with the material they are reading, such as questioning, clarifying, summarizing, or reacting to what they read. In the second approach, called cognitive engagement, the teacher uses questions to encourage students to think about various features of what they are reading, in order to strengthen their intellectual grasp of the material. In the second phase the researchers formally evaluated the effects of teachers' use of these two approaches, by randomly assigning teachers in second and fourth grade classrooms in participating schools into three groups of classrooms using cognitive strategies, cognitive engagement, or continuing to teach as they had before. In the third year, the researchers used the results of the prior study to synthesize the two approaches into a more comprehensive model and then tested the effects of the synthesized approach in comparison with normal teaching practices.