7 Strategies of Effective Readers

Earlier in the term, I read an interesting text about what effective readers do in reading to learn. I meant to share it but I got super busy this winter term. I had three heavy content courses that I was taking.

Here is the short information on the 7 Strategies of Highly Effective Readers* do:

1. Activating background knowledge: Connect your prior knowledge of what you know about the topic from the text you read. Recall relevant schema and experiences from long-term memory in order to extract and construct meaning from text.

2. Inferring: Bringing together what is spoken (written) in the text, what is unspoken (unwritten) in the text, and what is already known by the reader in order to extract and construct meaning from text. Basically, gather information from the text, reading between the lines and your schema to create your own meaning from the text.

3. Monitoring-Clarifying: Thinking about how and what one is reading, both during and after the act of reading, for purposes of determining if one is comprehending the text, combined with the ability to clarify and fix up any mix-ups if necessary. In other words, you are monitoring your comprehension while you read or after you read.

4.Questioning: Engaging in learning dialogues with text (authors), peers, and teachers through self-questioning, question generation, and question answering.

5. Searching-Selecting: Searching a variety of sources to select appropriate information to answer questions, define words and terms, clarify misunderstandings, solve problems, or gather information.

6. Summarizing: Restating the meaning of text in one's own words--different words from those used in the original text.

7. Visualizing-Organizing: Constructing a mental image or graphic organizer (ex. mind maps or T-charts) for the purpose of extracting and construct meaning from text.


All seven strategies are ways for you, the reader to connect to whatever text you're reading. Why do you read? What is your purpose for reading? Reading is to create meaning. By creating meaning, our minds are engaged.

*Resource: 7 Strategies of Highly Effective Readers:Using Cognitive Reserach to Boost K-8 Achievement by Elaine K. McEwan.