A few years ago, educational researchers David Pearson and Nell Duke asked the question, “What kind of thinking happens when proficient 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 aloud about your thinking) by modeling your own thinking aloud during the reading process. Students apply the new strategies by practicing their own thinking orally and in writing. Books such as Zimmerman and Keene’s Mosaic of Thought, Harvey and Goudvis’s Strategies that Work, and Miller’s Reading with Meaning explore these ideas in great depth and apply best teaching practices to teach reading strategies.

Strategy One: Make Connections

Readers bring their own experiences and background knowledge to the text. They make personal connections, they connect one text to another, and they 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 watching the “movie in your head.” Good readers experience seeing strong visual images. Children can be taught to visualize while reading. Poor readers often do not “see” when they read. We live in a visual world, yet it is the images that many readers are missing when reading.

Strategy Three: Questioning

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

Strategy four: infer

Good readers read between the lines. The answers are not always in black and white, and good readers can infer the 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, making key points, and expanding their thinking as they connect important ideas to their own knowledge.

Strategy Six: 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 a new thought.

Strategy Seven: Repair Strategies

Good readers know how to approach difficult texts. If they come across a word they don’t know, they break it up 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 focus on thinking about its meaning. They identify what they don’t understand and read backwards or forwards to try to clarify the meaning. They look at pictures or other features of the text (such as graphics or sidebars) to help them understand concepts or ideas. Repair strategies can be directly taught to help students break down a text and find its meaning.

These strategies are often taught separately, but need to be integrated and automated in the mind of the reader. 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 the text and derive meaning by applying their own prior knowledge or schema, as well as understanding the author’s message.