Cognitive Strategies Toolkit
This article describes eight cognitive strategies — including monitoring, tapping prior knowledge, and making predictions — to help readers develop their comprehension skills.
Cognitive strategy instruction develops the thinking skills that will make students strategic, flexible learners. People use such strategies all the time, like writing a note to remember an important fact. For some students, cognitive strategies must be explicitly taught so they will be able to consciously think, "This is the information I want, and this is the tool I can use to get it." Students must also have multiple opportunities to practice cognitive strategies. Thus, strategies become power tools, with greater flexibility.
The following toolkit was developed for teachers of English Language Learners participating in a California Writing Project study of the Pathway Project. It describes eight tools that every adolescent and adult reader should have at hand.
| Cognitive Strategies: A Toolkit for Readers | |
|---|---|
Planning and Goal Setting
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Monitoring
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| Note: From Olson, 2003, p. 8. Adapted from Flower and Hayes (1981); Langer (1989); Paris, Wasik and Turner (1991); Tierney and Pearson (1983); and Tompkins (1997). | |
Following is a list of sentence starters to help students access the strategies. The author of Pathway Project study explains,
In addition to declarative knowledge, students need also to develop the procedural knowledge of how to implement the strategies on their own as well as the conditional knowledge of when, why, and for how long to access the strategies in their tool kits as independent readers and writers. To foster such knowledge and to provide students with practice in using the cognitive strategies during teacher assigned and, especially student-selected reading, Pathway teachers also supplied students with the sentence openers shown to use in dialectical journals and in marginal notes in response to texts. These sentence starters later became guidelines for students as they met in writing groups to comment upon each other's writing.
| Cognitive Strategies Sentence Starters | |
|---|---|
Planning and Goal Setting
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Forming Interpretations
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| Note: From Olson, 2003, p. 8. Adapted from Flower and Hayes (1981); Langer (1989); Paris, Wasik and Turner (1991); Tierney and Pearson (1983); and Tompkins (1997). | |
References
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Olson, C.B. (2003). The reading/writing connection: Strategies for teaching and learning in the secondary classroom. Boston, MA: Allyn and Bacon.
Flower, L., & Hayes, J.R. (1981a). A cognitive process theory of writing. College Composition and Communication, 32, 365-387.
Flower, L., & Hayes, J.R. (1981b). Plans that guide the composing process. In C.H. Frederikesen & J.H. Dominic (Eds.), Writing: The nature, development, and teaching of written communication (Vol. 2, pp. 39-58). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Langer, J.A., & Applebee, A.N. (1986). Reading and writing instruction: Toward a theory of teaching and learning. In E.Z. Rothkopf (Ed.), Review of research in education (Vol. 13, pp. 171-179). Washington, DC: American Educational Research Association.
Paris, S.G., Wasik, B.A., & Turner, J.C. (1991). The development of strategic readers. In R. Barr, M.L. Kamil, P. Mosenthal, & P.D. Pearson (Eds.), Handbook of reading research, (Vol. 2, pp. 609-640). New York: Longman.
Tierney, R.J., & Pearson, P.D. (1983). Toward a composing model of reading. Language Arts, 60, 568-580.
Tompkins, G.E. (1997). Literacy for the 21-century: A balanced approach. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Excerpted with permission from the National Council of Teachers of English. Olson, C.B. and Land, R. (2007). A Cognitive Strategies Approach to Reading and Writing Instruction for English Language Learners in Secondary School. Research in the Teaching of English, 41(3), http://www.ncte.org/pubs/journals/rte/articles/126617.htm.
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