RECIPROCAL TEACHING - A REVIEW OF THE RESEARCH

Reciprocal teaching is an instructional procedure designed to teach st udents cognitive strategies that might lead to improved reading compre hension. The learning of cognitive strategies such as summarization, q uestion generation, clarification, and prediction is supported through dialogue between teacher and students as they attempt to gain meaning from text. This article is a review of sixteen studies on reciprocal teaching, which include published studies found in journal articles an d unpublished studies indexed in Dissertation Abstracts International. All the studies included in this review were quantitative in methodol ogy. When standardized tests were used to assess comprehension, the me dian effect size, favoring reciprocal teaching, was .32. When experime nter-developed comprehension tests were used, the median effect size w as .88. We also discuss the role of cognitive strategies in enhancing comprehension, the strategies that were most helpful, instructional ap proaches for teaching cognitive strategies, the quality of the dialogu e during reciprocal teaching, and suggestions for future research and practice.