Educational Leadership - September 2015

their review period. The results were striking. Students who’d been taught to use self-questioning techniques answered an average of 88. 7 percent questions correctly if they reviewed in a group and 81. 7 percent if they reviewed independently. This compared with average scores of 72. 8 and

64. 2, respectively, for untrained students who had reviewed in groups or independently.

King’s positive findings have been replicated with many other groups of students. Pate and Miller (2011), for example, applied King’s ideas with high school vocational students and found training in self-questioning boosted student scores on a test about electrical circuits by, on average, 10 percentage points. A synthesis of 20 years of research on strategies for teaching 4th and 5th graders with learning disabilities found that teaching self-questioning was one of the most effective techniques (Wanzek, Wexler, Vaughn, & Ciullo,

2010).

One such approach, called TWA (Think before reading, think While reading, think After reading) had a positive effect size of .99 on students’ abilities to assess main ideas, summarize, and retell narratives—an almost unheard-of result in education research (Mason, Snyder, Sukhram,

& Kedem, 2006). Similarly, in Spain, an experiment that taught students with learning disabilities to engage in self-questioning to activate prior knowledge, clarify new words, and identify main ideas helped them outperform a control group by an effect size of 3. 46 (Miranda, Villaescusa, & Vidal-Abarca, 1997)—another tremendous effect size.

Of seven strategies that the National
Reading Panel’s 2000 review of studies
on reading comprehension identified
as effective, two reflected student self-
questioning—“comprehension moni-
toring, where readers learn how to be
aware of their understanding of the
material” and “question generation,
Health and Human Development,
2000, p. 15).

An Intervention That Sticks

One striking aspect of these studies is the limited training time required to produce large, lasting results.

In King’s study, for example, the intervention lasted 90 minutes. In Pate and Miller’s study, students viewed a self-regulatory checklist, learned how to use it, and practiced using it with assistance from the teacher—a small investment of time to boost achievement by 10 percent (a full letter grade). Self-questioning techniques also appear to support knowledge retention.

Even more striking, perhaps, the technique itself seems to stick with students. In a second round of King’s experiment, a teacher delivered a lecture with no prompts about self-questioning. Students who were taught the self-questioning technique demonstrated higher levels of comprehension on a test of this new material.

Similarly, the TWA and Spanish studies found that the positive effects persisted for three weeks and two months, respectively, after the initial intervention.

In short, once students learned how
to actively engage in self-questioning,
they appeared to internalize the
strategy—which might begin a vir-
tuous circle. As students become better
learners, they begin to see themselves
as better learners, which, in turn,
inspires greater confidence and
engagement. As they begin to focus the
voice in their heads, they replace self-
doubt, distraction, and anxiety with a
calm, reassuring voice that says, I can
do this. EL

References

Harris, D. (2014). 10% happier: How I tamed the voice in my head, reduced stress without losing my edge, and found self-help that actually works—A true story. New York: HarperCollins.

King, A. (1991). Improving lecture comprehension: Effects of a meta-cognitive strategy. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 5( 4), 331–346.

Mason, L. H., Snyder, K. H., Sukhram, D. P., & Kedem, Y. (2006). TWA + PLANS strategies for expository reading and writing: Effects for nine fourth-grade students. Exceptional Children, 73( 1), 69–89.

Miranda, A., Villaescusa, M., & Vidal-Abarca, E. (1997). Is attribution retraining necessary? Use of self-regulation procedures for enhancing the reading comprehension strategies of children with learning disabilities. Journal of Learning Disabilities, 30( 5), 503–512.

National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. (2000). Report of the National Reading Panel: Teaching children to read: An evidence-based assessment of the scientific research literature on reading and its implications for reading instruction. Washington, DC: Author.

Pate, M. L., & Miller, G. (2011). Effects of regulatory self-questioning on secondary-level students’ problem-solving performance. Journal of Agricultural Education, 52( 1), 72–84.

Wanzek, J., Wexler, J., Vaughn, S., & Ciullo, S. (2010). Reading interventions for struggling readers in the upper elementary grades: A synthesis of 20 years of research. Reading and Writing, 23( 8), 889–912.

Bryan Goodwin ( bgoodwin@mcrel.org) is president and CEO of McREL, Denver, Colorado. He is the author of The 12 Touchstones of Good Teaching: A Checklist for Staying Focused Every Day (ASCD, 2013). Heather Hein (hhein@ mcrel.org) is a communications consultant at McREL.