Teach the Seven Strategies of Highly Effective Readers

Some pupils simply struggle with reading more so than their peers. For educators, this can be frustrating, as some pupils race ahead in their learning, whereas others are clearly held back as they are unable to access materials which are available to support them.

Created by Elaine K. McEwan to improve students’ reading comprehension, teachers should introduce the seven cognitive strategies of effective readers:

activating,
inferring,
monitoring-clarifying,
questioning,
searching-selecting,
summarizing, and
visualising-organizing.

Included in her online resource, definitions of the seven strategies and a lesson-plan template for teaching each one are provided which can be used as a strategy to support students who struggle, especially with comprehending what is being read.

In the article, Elaine says…

If the struggling readers in your content classroom routinely miss the point when “reading” content text, consider teaching them one or more of the seven cognitive strategies of highly effective readers. Cognitive strategies are the mental processes used by skilled readers to extract and construct meaning from text and to create knowledge structures in long-term memory. When these strategies are directly taught to and modeled for struggling readers, their comprehension and retention improve.