The Role of the Students in Cognitive Strategies
Helfeldt and Henk (1990) explained Palinscar and Brown's (1988) thoughts about good readers. Palinscar and Brown (1988) wrote that students who are successful readers are constantly using strategies such as self-questioning, rephrasing their thoughts, seeking relationships among ideas presented, and summarizing as a way of constructing meaning. On the other hand, students who are poor readers have inefficiencies in cognition and metacognition through a lack of strategic processing (Gersten, Fuchs, Williams, & Baker, 2001). Flood and Lapp (1990) discussed the importance of a competent reader actively constructing meaning where the reader is interacting and transacting with the text. Flood and Lapp (1990) go further and explain that good readers have learned that it is the reader who constructs meaning, not the text or even the author. Katims and Harris (1997) suggest that low-achieving readers are able to be successful with comprehension, as long as they are taught how and when to process this information in a strategic and active manner.
The way that students go
about the learning and studying of text influences how they interpret the task,
interact with the text, and the strategies that they employ (Simpson, &
Nist, 2000). One way a student can take
control of his or her own learning is to share their thought process aloud,
refer to prior knowledge when encountering unfamiliar text, predict constantly
about what the text is about, make inferences on what is taking place in the
text, and self-question when reading text (Oster, 2001). The student is not a passive observer, but
an active participant in the classroom, and has control of his or her own
learning.