A few years ago, educational researchers David Pearson and Nell Duke asked the question, “What kind of thinking occurs when competent readers read?” This question led to groundbreaking research results that have changed the way teachers teach children to read.

They discovered seven key strategies that good readers use during the reading process. Innovative teachers teach the strategies directly using metacognitive thinking (thinking out loud about your thinking) by modeling your own thinking out loud during the reading process. Students apply the new strategies by practicing their own thinking orally and in writing. Books like Mosaic of Thought by Zimmerman and Keene, Strategies that Work by Harvey and Goudvis, and Reading with Meaning by Miller explore these ideas in great depth and apply best teaching practices to teaching reading strategies.

Strategy One: Make Connections

Readers bring their own prior experiences and knowledge to the text. They make personal connections, connect one text to another, and make connections to the world. These connections enrich the text and help the reader understand the text at a higher level of meaning. Teachers teach these connections directly: text-to-self connections, text-to-text connections, and text-to-world connections.

Strategy two: visualize or imagine

Readers see images in their minds when they read. The best part of reading is seeing the “movie in your head.” Good readers experience seeing strong visual images. Children can be taught to visualize while reading. Poor readers often don’t “see” when they read. We live in a visual world, however, it is the images that many readers lack when they read.

Strategy Three: Questioning

Readers are constantly questioning, predicting, confirming their thinking, and adjusting their thinking. Good readers have a purpose for continuing to read. The purpose lies in your ability to question and predict throughout the reading of the text. The adjustments made help readers understand the text at a deeper level. Their basic and deeper understanding rises when their minds are constantly making sense of it through questioning.

Strategy Four: Infer

Good readers read between the lines. Answers are not always black and white, and good readers can infer meaning based on prior knowledge and clues in the text. When a reader infers, he is thinking, predicting, adjusting, and confirming. This leads to a deeper understanding of the text.

Strategy Five: Determine Importance

Good readers understand the main ideas of a text and can determine what is important. Readers are answering questions, determining key points, and expanding their thinking as they connect important ideas to their own knowledge.

Sixth Strategy: Synthesize

Good readers are able to synthesize their reading and produce their own ideas or products from their knowledge. Synthesizing is a higher order thinking skill that requires going beyond basic knowledge and creating new thought.

Strategy Seven: Repair Strategies

Good readers know how to tackle difficult texts. If they come across a word they don’t know, they break it down and use context clues to determine the meaning. If they have just finished a paragraph and have no idea what they just read, they reread the paragraph and concentrate on thinking about its meaning. They identify what they do not understand and read backwards or forwards to try to clarify the meaning. They look at pictures or other text features (such as graphics or sidebars) to help them understand concepts or ideas. Repair strategies can be taught directly to help students break down a text and find its meaning.

These strategies are often taught separately, but must be integrated and automated in the reader’s mind. Once students are aware of these strategies and learn to apply them during their own reading process, they automatically begin to become part of their thinking. Strategies help readers understand text and gain meaning by applying their own background knowledge or schema, as well as help them understand the author’s message.