Metacognition: Is Your Child Thinking While Reading?

The Importance of Metacognitive Reading Strategies

Metacogntion: A coach in your head saying, ‘Does this make sense, should I reread this page.”

Your child will not do well in college if they don’t use metacognitive reading strategies. It’s the final step in reading proficiency and the ultimate reading skill. It’s what separates excellent readers from mediocre readers. It’s also the difference between average grades and excellent grades.

However, reading with metacognition is a long journey. It takes years to master. Here, we discuss metacognition and what it takes to read with it.

What Is Metacognition in Reading?

The simplest definitions of metacognition are “thinking about one’s thinking” or “knowing about knowing.” Metacognition refers to the process of considering and regulating one’s learning. By reading, the reader can think critically about her understanding as she goes. She is aware of her own cognitive experience.

The keys are knowing about knowing and then doing something about that knowledge. A metacognition example is when reading a text, asking yourself am I understanding this, or should I go back and read prior paragraphs or chapters so this will make more sense? The first part is knowledge of cognition. The second part is the regulation of cognition to maximize learning. Metacognition refers to both.

Deep Understanding

A key aspect of reading comprehension is deep understanding. Deep understanding goes beyond literal comprehension and factual knowledge. It’s about putting information in context, connecting it to prior knowledge, interpreting, analyzing, and contrasting it with previously held understanding to revise that understanding.

The key point about deep understanding is that once you truly and deeply understand something, you can do something positive with that understanding. Things like:

• create or design
• generalize or reflect
• theorize or hypothesize
• criticize or think critically about its implications
• distill to promote better understanding for others

Of course, deep understanding is a major career and life skill, particularly in today’s knowledge economy. Deep understanding takes time to develop and practice. Deep understanding requires metacognition.

If a child is reading with metacognition and deep understanding, he is learning at the highest level.

Metacognitive Strategies

A student needs to learn how to use metacognitive reading strategies to develop a deep understanding of the text. It’s a skill that includes the following elements:

• Planning
• Active reading strategies
• Fix up strategies

Planning – What Do I Need To Know?

Metacognition is not going to develop until a child is “leaning forward” with reading until she is engaged and motivated to improve her literacy skills and attack each text with a plan, motivated and engaged.

Planning in this context means assessing knowledge before reading, having a strategy for filling in gaps, and where relevant, selecting the right text to read. Questions might be: What don’t I know?  What do I need from this text?

Active Reading Strategies – Am I Understanding This?

This is active thinking while reading. Literal reading comprehension is not enough. A good reader is making connections to prior knowledge or earlier parts of the text, she is making inferences, and predictions on where the writer is going. While reading.

Metacognitive reading strategies are about taking charge of reading, and monitoring comprehension while reading. Students who read with metacognition constantly ask themselves “Do I understand what I just read?” or “What is the main point here?” It requires constant attention and a questioning mindset.  And ultimately, it means being able to determine the relevance of new information, to put it in the right context.

Fix-Up Strategies – Should I Read This Page Again?

Sometimes while reading, the text does not make sense. In these cases, metacognitive reading strategies such as slowing down to match the text’s difficulty or circling back to earlier in the book for context might help. This “fixing up” of problems found during reading is a key example of metacognitive proficiency.

Not surprisingly, metacognitive skills require a lot of reading practice. Many high schoolers do not get to practice metacognitive reading strategies because they cannot master the fundamental reading skills that make thinking while reading and metacognition possible.

Is your child thinking while reading? Take our free online reading assessment to find out where your child’s reading stands.

How To Improve Metacognition In Reading

Metacognitive skills and fix-up strategies for kids will improve with practice. But two foundational skills must be in place before that practice can truly start:

1. The ability to think while reading
2. A motivated, lean-forward attitude to reading

Think While Reading — Needs To Be Automatic

Many struggling readers cannot think while reading because decoding and sounding out words takes up too much concentration. In elementary school, this decoding effort can crowd out even literal comprehension.

Decoding skills do improve over time. However, many high school students do not improve reading fluency enough to free up their minds for reading comprehension and metacognition.

Lean Forward Attitude To Reading — Needs To Be Rewarding

For many people, reading is a lifelong passion. They read effortlessly and get a great deal out of every book. They understand the content perfectly, and the content makes them think, takes them to faraway places, or entertains them. They find reading rewarding.

If you cannot read with comprehension, reading is not rewarding. If decoding is inefficient or vocabulary or language understanding is compromised, reading is a chore, possibly a source of humiliation, definitely not a joy. These struggling readers find it hard to lean forward into reading. Their default position is more avoidance than engagement. They will only slowly develop metacognitive strategies, if ever.

How To Help Your Child Become A Metacognitive Reader

Reading skills develop in a 7-step sequence. Your child cannot even begin developing metacognitive reading strategies until he masters the skills at the lower levels of the pyramid.

• Mastering cognitive skills that make reading easier — phonological awareness, attention, working memory, language processing.
• Reading fluency—the ability to read at natural language speed, with inflection —is only possible if a child reads with automaticity, effortlessly. (Tanja C Roembke, Iowa Reading Research Center)  Truly fluent readers can think while reading.
• Reading comprehension makes reading rewarding. Once a child reads effortlessly, instruction in vocabulary, grammar, etc., can quickly improve comprehension. From there, he has every chance of becoming an enthusiastic “lean forward” reader who practices metacognitive reading strategies.
• Reading with metacognition – the ultimate reading skill.

At each level, reading programs and strategies can help accelerate natural reading growth.

Early in the cognitive skill phase, phonics and language-processing programs that develop phonemic awareness are most helpful.

Once reading is fluent, the emphasis can move to exercises that develop inferential thinking and abstract reasoning in a while-reading context, reading practice, and finding those just-right books that can ignite a lifelong love of reading.

This creates a foundation for reading comprehension. Then a student can start practicing and honing metacognition while reading.

The sooner a child can master the skills at the lower levels of the pyramid, the sooner he can begin developing metacognitive reading strategies, which take years of practice to perfect.

Fast ForWord For Metacognition

Our reading intervention programs for struggling readers are comprehensive, with exercises at each stage of the pyramid. Initially, the focus is on mastering cognitive skills such as decoding automaticity and reading fluency. Our reading comprehension programs in the Fast ForWord series prepare your child for metacognitive reading skills through exercises that require thinking while reading.

The program uses simple tasks to exercise thinking and analysis while reading. For instance, while reading, it will ask 2nd-grade students whether the word “apple” is a fruit or a vegetable. Later on, it will ask a 5th-grade reader to fill in missing words in sentences and paragraphs, which requires the active metacognitive strategy of identifying the main idea in any text.

This develops an active reading approach, always thinking and adjusting while reading, which is the definition of metacognition in reading. Request a demo to see Fast ForWord in action.