Effective Comprehension Instruction At The Pre-Service Level

A higher education development team consisting of four professors of reading at two universities designed a set of lessons for possible use in helping teachers or preservice teachers develop strategies to produce effective comprehension skills of elementary students. These techniques were first used with undergraduate candidates and then revised to use with reading coaches in the literacy demonstration sites around the state of Alabama. The author describes a set of four interventions based upon this work that was used with graduate preservice teachers in a reading methods course. Three areas were emphasized in this investigation: changing preservice teachers’ misconceptions about the meaning of comprehension, helping them understand what readers do to comprehend text, and teaching them how comprehension can be explicitly taught to elementary students. Through these interventions, the preservice teachers gained a better understanding of how to teach comprehension more effectively to K – 6 students.