Conclusion

Cognitive strategy instruction does work to improve readers’ comprehension performance. In her 2000 address to teachers, Carol Minnick Santa, president of the International Reading Association, noted that “teaching [comprehension] is a lot harder and more abstract than teaching phonemic awareness or language structures. Moreover, effective comprehension instruction…demands extensive teacher knowledge” (Santa, published online). In 1993, after a five-year long study of teaching teachers to implement comprehension strategy instruction, Gerald G. Duffy, a developer of the direct-instruction approach to cognitive strategy instruction, concluded that teaching students to acquire and use strategies requires a fundamental "change in how teacher educators and staff developers work with teachers and what they count as important about learning to be a teacher" (Duffy, p. 244). Successful comprehension teachers must be strategic themselves, coordinating individual strategies and altering, adjusting, modifying, testing, and shifting tactics appropriately until readers’ comprehension problems are resolved. For readers to become good reading strategists requires teachers who have appreciation for reading strategies.