iSTART 1 iSTART: Interactive Strategy Training for Active Reading and Thinking

Unfortunately, many students have difficulty understanding what they read, particularly the challenging textbooks they encounter in their academic courses (Bowen, 1999; Snow, 2002). This research addresses the pressing need to improve students ’ ability to comprehend and learn from textbook material. There are several directions that can be taken to tackle this problem. For example, the recent RAND report (Snow, 2002) presents four interactive components critical to reading comprehension: Characteristics of the reader, the text, the comprehension activities, and the sociocultural context. Each of these components and their combinations offer potential avenues of research. The intervention proposed here focuses on the reader’s comprehension activities and improving those activities as a function of the reader’s aptitudes and needs. Our approach is based on the premise that many students fail to use metacognitive strategies while reading their course material (Cottrell & McNamara, 2002; Cox, 1997