The Relationships among Reported Strategy Use, Metacognitive Awareness, and Reading Achievement

Hong-Nam, K., Leavell, A. G., & Maher, S. (2014). The relationships among reported strategy use, metacognitive awareness, and reading achievement of high school students. Reading Psychology, 35(8), 762-790. doi:10.1080/02702711.2013.807900

Background

The authors highlighted research that had shown that there was a correlation between readers’ strategy use and reading achievement, that is, proficient readers tended to deploy more metacognitive strategies and on a more frequent basis.

Aims

The study investigated the strategic reading behaviours of high school students, their metacognitive and cognitive strategy uses, and the relationship between their strategy use and reading achievement.

Sample

The participants were 2,789 students from two suburban high schools in Texas who had undergone a school-wide content-literacy strategy initiative.

Method

Three instruments were used for data collection:

i. the Individual Background Questionnaire to collect demographic data and the participants’ self-rated reading proficiency;

ii. the Metacognitive Awareness of Reading Strategies Inventory (MARSI) to measure the participants’ awareness of the underlying processes involved in reading categorised into Global (or metacognitive) Reading Strategies, Problem-Solving (or cognitive) Reading Strategies, and Support Reading Strategies; and

iii. the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills (TAKS) to measure students’ achievement in reading

Findings

The data analysis indicated four categories of strategy use: Metacognitive Awareness Strategies (MAS), Text-Based Strategies (TBS), Reading Process Strategies (RPS) and Predicting Strategies (PS). Overall the participants possessed knowledge of reading strategies and reported using them during reading to help them comprehend text more effectively. Over half the participants reported strategy use in the medium range as measured by the MARSI instrument while 30% indicated a high level of strategy use during reading. The proficient readers were able to use metacognitive strategies and to use a number of strategies more often than poor readers. A strong positive correlation between reading achievements as measured by the TAKS reading test and student strategy use was observed. In terms of variation in strategy, all the participants reported using RPS the most, followed by PS. In the use of reading strategies by grade, students in higher grades adopted more strategies than students in lower grades. Students in the 10th, 11th, and 12th grades used all four categories of strategies more than students in the ninth grade. Students in the 12th grade employed more MAS compared with the other grade levels.

Implications

The authors highlighted that it would be imperative for literacy educators to undertake more research on how adolescents perceived their reading ability and strategic reading behaviours in order to understand their reading behaviours and to help schools, teachers, and researchers focus on literacy skill growth among adolescent across all subject areas.

Original article retrieved from Taylor & Francis.