Metacognitive scaffolding and monitoring on reading comprehension

Dabarera, C., Renandya, W. A., & Zhang, L. J. (2014). The impact of metacognitive scaffolding and monitoring on reading comprehension. System, 42, 462-473.

Background

According to the authors, research suggested that the explicit teaching of strategies could promote better metacognition and reading comprehension, and develop learners’ effective use of these strategies.

Aims

The study explored metacognitive awareness as a means to improve reading comprehension ability, via teacher scaffolding and monitoring.

Sample

The participants were two Express stream classes of Secondary 1 students in a Singapore government school that were comparable in academic abilities.

Method

The data sources were the Metacognitive Awareness of Reading Strategies Inventory (MARSI) and the University of New South Wales, International Competitions and Assessments for Schools, English competition Paper F (2008) that were used to measure the students’ metacognitive awareness and reading comprehension ability. Student experiences with metacognitive strategy instruction were elicited via semi-structured interviews. The intervention involved the explicit teaching of metacognitive strategies via the Reciprocal Teaching approach.

Findings

The results demonstrated a significant positive correlation between the post-intervention MARSI overall average scores and reading comprehension scores for the experimental group. They also indicated that metacognitive awareness raising (via strategy instruction) was positively correlated to reading comprehension improvement. The authors found a high frequency of reading strategy use for the experimental group. In comparison, the control group’s means demonstrated a medium frequency of reading strategy use. The semi-structured interviews with the experimental group revealed that none of the three students had metacognitive strategy training prior to the intervention phase. However, they perceived themselves to be using reading strategies at an increased frequency after receiving the metacognitive strategy instruction. Although they seemed to have acquired a fair amount of knowledge of metacognitive strategies, this knowledge was not very sophisticated and limited to the Global Reading Strategies (GLOB) which were general reading strategies focused on preparations for reading. There was an aversion to Support Reading Strategies (SUP) that involved the utilization of practical strategies. This might also have indicated an inability to apply some strategies as a means to improving comprehension.

Implications

The author suggested that as teacher perceptions and attitudes are factors that impact upon and determine the success of the enacted curriculum to some extent, future research could explore teacher perceptions of the significance for teaching metacognitive strategies. This could provide useful data that could help track teachers’ perceptions over time and enable the identification of key factors that affect changes in their perceptions and applications of metacognitive strategies in their teaching.

Original article retrieved from ScienceDirect.