- The aim of this study was to investigate the effects of three different forms of strategy instruction on 210 elementary-school students' reading comprehension. Students were assigned to any one of three intervention conditions or to a traditional instruction condition (control condition). Training students were taught four reading strategies (summarizing, questioning, clarifying, predicting) and practiced these strategies in small groups (reciprocal teaching), pairs, or instructor-guided small groups. At both the post- and follow-up test the intervention students attained higher scores on an experiment-developed task of reading comprehension and strategy use than the control students who received traditional instruction. Furthermore, students who practiced reciprocal teaching in small groups outperformed use than the control students who received traditional instruction groups on a standardized reading comprehension test.
