Reciprocal teaching: A review of the research

Reciprocal teaching is an instructional plocedure designed to teach students cognitive strategies that might lead to improved redding comprehension. The learning of cognitive etrategies such as summarization, question goneration, clarification, and prediction is supported through dialogue between teactea and students as they attempt to gain meaning from textt Thii article is a review of sixteen studies on reciprocal leaching, which include published studies found in journal articles snd unpublished studies indexed in Disserta-tion Abstracts Internationall Alllhe studies sncluded in nhis seview were quantitative in methodology. When standardized tests were used to assess comprehension,,he median effect tize, favoring reciprocal teaching, waw.32. When experimenter-developed domprehension teste were used, the median effect size was.88. We allo discuss the role of cognitive strstegteg in enhancing comprehension, the strategies that were most helpful, instruc-tional approaches for teaching gognitive strategies, the quality of the dia-logue during reciprocal leaching, and suggestions for future research and practice. Reciprocal teaching is an instructional approach that features "guided practice in applying simple, concrete strategies to the task of text comprehension" (Brown & Palincsar, 1989, p. 413). Reciprocal teaching was first described by Palincsar (1982) and Palincsar and Brown (1984), and the description was extended in their later articles, particularly in Palincsar (1986) and Brown and Palincsar (1989). This is a review of the studies that have used reciprocal teaching as an instructional procedure to improve student comprehension of text. Until the late 1970s, students were seldom taught cognitive strategies that could assist them in reading. In a classic observational study of reading comprehension instruction, Durkin (1979) noted that of the 4,469 minutes of grade 4 reading instruction she observed, only 20 minutes were spent in comprehension instruction by the teacher. Durkin noted that teachers spent a great deal of instructional tim