Metacognition:  Good readers are metacognitive.  They monitor their reading and learning and know what to do if they are not comprehending.

Background Knowledge:  The key to comprehension is the ability to integrate new information with prior understandings and to identify faulty background knowledge and correct it.

Purpose Setting:  Having a purpose for reading and learning allows students to focus on the important information and organize it in a meaningful way.

Active Learning:  When students are purposefully engaged in the process of learning through discussion, writing, and transforming information, their comprehension will be greater.

Discussion:  Student-centered discussions, as opposed to teacher-led conversations, cultivate an exchange of ideas while developing higher-level reading skills and comprehension.

Writing:  Writing helps students make sense of what they are learning.  If they can explain ideas through writing, students can claim the knowledge as their own.

Organization:  If students can effectively organize information from text, they will learn and remember it better.  Having a collection of organizing strategies from which to choose enables students to take notes from all text structures and for a variety of writing tasks.

Author’s Craft:  Strong research supports the idea that knowledge of expository and narrative text structure plays an important role in comprehension.

Teaching for Understanding:  Teaching for understanding goes beyond knowing the information.  It is being able to do a variety of thought-demanding activities with a topic such as explaining, finding examples, producing evidence, generalizing, and representing the ideas in a new way.