Reading for meaning: The efficacy of reciprocal teaching in fostering reading comprehension in high school students in remedial reading classes

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of strategy instruction on reading comprehension. The main objective of strategy instruction is to foster comprehension monitoring. The study examined whether reciprocal teaching methods (strategy instruction) were superior to traditional methods of remedial reading (skill acquisition) in large intact high school remedial classes. This setting was chosen because it is a more natural setting for the implementation of reciprocal teaching than settings used in previous studies. With a methodology similar to that used in the pioneering work of Palincsar and Brown (1984), 53 students in five intact reading classes who received strategy instruction were compared to 22 students in three control-group classes. The results indicated that in this challenging setting strategy instruction was superior to traditional reading methods in fostering reading comprehension as measured by experimenter-designed reading tests. Consistent with previous research, no differences were found between the groups on two standardized measures of reading.