(Unshelved for Tuesday, October 16, 2007 by Bill Barnes and Gene Ambaum)
Perkins and Swartz (Perkins, 1992) define four levels of metacognitive knowledge that are helpful for understanding how learners and readers adapt strategies to their reading purposes. These four levels illustrate how learners move from less to more sophisticated way of monitoring their own thinking.
Perkins and Swartz identify four kinds of learners/readers:
1. Tacit learners/readers: These are readers who lack awareness of how they think when they read. (They are passive instead of active toward learning).
2. Aware learners/readers: These are readers who realize when meaning has broken down or confusion has set in but who may not have sufficient strategies for fixing the problems.
3. Strategic learners/readers: These are readers who use the thinking and comprehension to enhance understanding and acquire knowledge. They are able to monitor and repair meaning when it is disrupted.
4. Reflective learners/readers: These are the readers who are strategic about their thinking and are able to apply strategies flexibly depending on their goals or purpose for reading. According to Perkins and Swartz, they also “reflect on their thinking and ponder and revise their use of strategies.”
Making connections: A bridge from the new to the known
In the 1980s cognitive psychologists devised that term schema theory to explain how our previous experiences, knowledge, emotions, and understandings have a major effect on what and how we learn (Anderson & Pearson, 1984).
Our schema—the sum total our background knowledge and experience—is what each of us brings to our reading. Applied to reading, we can activate and use schema theory as we guide students to make connections between books and their own lives.
Our schema—the sum total our background knowledge and experience—is what each of us brings to our reading. Applied to reading, we can activate and use schema theory as we guide students to make connections between books and their own lives.
Having students access and use their prior knowledge and experiences to better understand what they read is often our launching point for strategy instruction because every student has experiences, knowledge, opinions, or emotions to draw upon. There are three kinds of connections to reading. It made a lot of sense to distinguish between connections that are:
1. Text-to-self—connections that readers make between the ext and their past experiences or background knowledge.
2. Text-to-text—connections that readers make between the text they are reading and another text, including books, poems, scripts, songs, or anything that is written.
3. Text-to-world—connections that readers make between that text and the bigger issues, events, or connections of society and the world at large.
One caution, however, P. David Pearson, reading researcher and professor of education at Michigan State University, reminds us that "they just because readers say they are using a strategy to better understand what they read doesn't necessarily mean that they are. And conversely, just because students do not articulate the thinking behind the strategy doesn't mean they aren't using it to better understand what they read" (1995).
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