Reciprocal Teaching for Reading Comprehension in Higher Education: A Strategy for Fostering the Deeper Understanding of Texts

Assigning students the reading of historical texts, scholarly articles, popular press books, and/or Internet publications is common in higher education. Perhaps equally common is instructor disappointment in students' comprehension of assigned readings. This lack of good reading comprehension skills is exacerbated by the central role of reading comprehension in higher education success. One solution to this problem of poor reading comprehension skills is the explicit teaching of reading comprehension strategies to both undergraduate and graduate students, specifically, reciprocal teaching. In the following article the foundations and methods of reciprocal teaching are defined and then each author, in turn, delineates how he or she uses reciprocal teaching in his or her classroom. These examples demonstrate the flexibility and transferability of this basic strategy as the five authors teach in an array of domains.

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