Reading With Metacognition

Definition, Programs And Metacognitive Strategies

Metacognition Definition
The most famous definition of metacognition is "knowing about knowing." It refers to the process of considering and regulating one's own learning. Activities include assessing or reviewing one's current and previous knowledge, identifying gaps in that knowledge, planning gap-filling strategies, determining the relevance of new information, and potentially revising beliefs on the subject.

Reading With Metacognition
Reading text with metacognition is the ultimate reading skill. It's the tip of the reading pyramid, the culmination of all the other reading skills that will define your child's success in school, in college and in life.
Reading skills helped by our programs

Good readers use metacognitive strategies. That is, they think critically about their own understanding as they go. This high level ability to be aware of your own cognitive experience is the difference between a good and excellent reader, and an average or great ACT or SAT score. Metacognitive reading strategies include:

• Motivation and engagement
• Active reading strategies
• Monitoring strategies
• Fix up strategies

These skills are developed by being clear about the purpose for reading before reading, by monitoring understanding and adjusting speed to fit the difficulty of the text and "fixing up" any problems they have during reading, and by checking their understanding of what they have read, after reading.

Not surprisingly, these skills require an enormous amount of reading practice, which in turn requires fluency and sound reading comprehension. For many high schoolers, metacognitive reading is an unpracticed skill, because so much energy and concentration is absorbed in the task of decoding.

How We Improve Metacognition In Reading

First: Reading Fundamentals

Our research based reading programs start at the bottom of the pyramid, working on the cognitive skills and decoding automaticity, required skills before the reading comprehension and metacognitive skills in the top half can be practiced and developed.
Reading software process

Then: Metacognitive Reading Strategies

Our reading comprehension programs in the Fast ForWord reading series develop metacognition reading skills and literal reading comprehension in lock step.

Almost all exercises incorporate thinking while reading, to practice metacognitive reading strategies. Exercises vary from simple analytical tasks like categorizing vocabulary words -- the idea being to develop an active reading approach -- to always thinking while reading. The program progresses to more complex tasks, such as filling in missing words in sentences and then in paragraphs, which require the active metacognitive strategy of identifying the main idea in any text.

Eventually, in Fast ForWord Reading Levels 3, 4 and 5, the exercises escalate to picking up nuanced differences in matching similar sentences to a complicated picture -- this develops analytical, self correction skills -- and putting a scrambled group of sentences into a meaningful order, which requires a high level understanding of the main idea in the text and an ability to see the flow, to predict the logical next events in a passage. These techniques exercise inferential thinking and abstract reasoning in a while-reading context.

Fast ForWord Reading Level 5
Fast ForWord Reading Level 5 also develops metalinguistic skills, the ability to manipulate and play with the language, to help perfect vocabulary and language knowledge at the highest level. Children start work on metalinguistics as toddlers, rhyming being the most important early metalinguistic skill. Later on these skills help build reading automaticity, effortless decoding. Reading Level 5 pushes these skills to a whole new level, developing a comfort with the language in all forms.

Fast ForWord Reading Level 5 helps reading for middle school, high school, and adults. It is a challenging and sophisticated program that has a great record of success, pushing reading comprehension and metacognition reading skills to their natural limit.
Reading programs for struggling readers