Comprehension Strategies
Effective reading comprehension relies on a reader’s metacognition—"knowing what you know and what you don't know." Metacognitive readers are aware of when they do not understand what they are reading and know how to remedy that. This requires the use of multiple comprehension strategies to read, interpret, and respond to text before, during, and after reading:
- Monitoring for meaning – knowing what you understand, when you do not understand, and what to do when comprehension is blocked.
- Using and creating schema – using background knowledge to connect to new information.
- Asking questions – continually asking questions about the text information and the author’s purpose, and using these questions to set a focus for subsequent reading.
- Determining importance – given a purpose for reading, knowing how to determine what information is important to remember.
- Inferring – combining background knowledge with new information to arrive at an understanding.
- Visualizing – creating “pictures in the mind” while reading.
- Synthesizing – using multiple sources of information to arrive at a new understanding.
You will now look at two readings and consider which comprehension strategies would be the most important for students to use in order to answer questions about each text.
Download the Comprehension Strategies Worksheet 
(PDF). The strategies are reprinted in this document for your reference.
For each reading question, write down two to three strategies students would need to understand the text and answer the question effectively.
