Metacognitive Strategies

These are the strategies that strong readers and strong learners have:

Predicting - This encourages students to read with a purpose and to confirm or correct what they predicted.

Self-questioning - Allows learners to actively check how much they understand while reading. Students can pose questions such as, "What is the main idea?" and "Are there examples to help me understand what I just read?" Students who ask their own questions show greater improvement in comprehension.

Paraphrasing - By putting the concepts of a passage or section into their own words, or by summarizing the main points, students get a sense of how much they understand.

Visual Representation - Creating visual models of ideas within a text provides a means of organizing information into understandable wholes, and promotes the visualization of relationships.

Lookback - This strategy involves referring to what has already been read in order to increase understanding of the material.

Changing Reading Speed - When students encounter obstacles like an unusual writing style or too many unknown words, they can modify their reading speed. Good readers are able to determine the appropriate pace for their purpose. For example, they can determine when it is best to quickly scan the material (such as newspapers) and when to read slowly and deliberately (such as a science textbook).