The following framework may help you see how strategies can support you before, during, and after reading.
Ø When skilled comprehenders pick up a new text, they approach the reading task very deliberately, with a plan to understand the text for a particular purpose. To prepare (or plan) to understand a text, skilled comprehenders preview the text, make connections to their own prior knowledge about the topic of the text, ask themselves questions about what they might encounter in the text, and make predictions about what they expect to discover as they read. Moreover, they preview the text’s structure because they are aware that knowledge of text structure will help them organize incoming information as they read and support their own construction of a model of the text’s meaning in working memory. Thus, even when planning for comprehension before reading begins, skilled comprehenders display remarkable cognitive flexibility, shifting between thoughts of their own prior knowledge, asking questions, making predictions, and previewing text structure, all while maintaining focus on their primary goal for understanding the text.
Ø As they begin to read, skilled comprehenders rely on their high levels of cognitive flexibility to manage decoding processes while building a coherent model of text meaning in working memory, continuing to draw on their prior knowledge to understand the ideas and words they encounter and to make gap-filling inferences when necessary. These activities require that skilled comprehenders flexibly juggle multiple kinds of information as they read, such as letter–sound and morphological information recruited in decoding processes, information about text and language organization, word meanings and their links to prior knowledge, visualization of actions and events in working memory, text-based inference and integration processes, information and inferences about characters’ internal mental worlds that recruit social understanding processes, and updating the ever-evolving model of text meaning under construction in working memory as these processes continue.
Ø Skilled comprehenders also draw on their inhibition processes while reading to suppress irrelevant information in the text, to ignore other distractions in the environment, and to refrain from engaging in habitual behaviors that would not support reading comprehension, such as looking at their phones or checking social media.
Ø Skilled comprehenders are able to manage flexibly all of these processes while they identify the most important features of text to construct summaries in working memory that will support comprehension and memory for text content during reading and after reading has concluded.
Ø Summarization necessarily requires maintenance of relevant information in working memory, inhibition of attention to irrelevant or tangential information, and the cognitive flexibility necessary to switch back and forth between the more detailed model of the text’s meaning and the summary of the essential portions of the text.
Ø Finally, even after they finish reading a text, skilled comprehenders continue to reflect on text content, connecting the new information they have learned to their existing knowledge structures in ways that capitalize on their existing conceptual organization, flexibly shifting and adjusting their own knowledge structures as necessary in response to the new information gleaned from text.
Ø In addition, skilled comprehenders draw conclusions about the questions and predictions that guided their planning and processing of the text, and they evaluate the extent to which they were successful in implementing their plan to reach particular comprehension goals. These postreading activities necessarily recruit working memory and cognitive flexibility as skilled readers reflect on their summary of text information; call their own prior knowledge, predictions, and questions into working memory; flexibly shift and revise knowledge structures as necessary; and evaluate the extent to which their comprehension goals and plans were met.