How metacognitive routines can boost reading comprehension

Year 5 teacher Aaron Regan explains how a series of metacognitive strategies has helped his class to get better at inference and articulating their ideas about texts

It was a pattern in my Year 5 class’s reading outcomes that first made me realise I needed to try a new approach to  teaching reading comprehension.

Pupils were answering retrieval questions confidently, but when it came to inference or prediction, their responses were often hesitant or little more than guesses. What really stood out was their struggle to articulate how they had reached an answer. They could tell me what they thought, but not why.

To take them to the next level in their comprehension, I knew I needed to find a way to get them thinking more deeply about what they were reading, and to better apply their understanding across texts.

I wanted to explore whether metacognitive strategies – specifically, Harvard University’s Project Zero thinking routines – could help with this, so I embarked on an action research project to find out.

My school, The British International School Abu Dhabi, is part of Nord Anglia Education’s global research partnership with Boston College and Harvard Project Zero. Across Nord Anglia, metacognition has been identified as a key driver of student success. The project looks at how teaching children to think about their own thinking improves both academic progress and personal growth.

Being part of this wider initiative gave me confidence that the approach I was trialling in my classroom could have a real and lasting impact.

Metacognitive strategies for reading comprehension

Project Zero’s thinking routines are sets of questions or brief sequences of steps used to scaffold and support student thinking.

When I began embedding some of these strategies into our guided reading work, I matched the routines directly to the kinds of questions children were finding difficult. For example, for prediction questions, we used the “See, think, wonder“ routine (which “encourages students to make careful observations and thoughtful interpretations”) and the “See, wonder, connect x2” routine (which supports “looking closely and making connections to deepen understanding”).

These routines encouraged children to slow down and notice what was happening in the text, to be curious and to ask questions, and then to connect ideas to their own prior knowledge and experiences. In practice, this meant pupils were not just guessing at what might come next but generating far richer predictions, grounded in curiosity about the text and connections to what they already knew.

For inference style questions, I introduced the “Feelings and options” routine (which “scaffolds perspective taking, empathic problem-solving, ethics spotting and communication skills”) and the “Step in, step out, step back” routine (which is for “nurturing a disposition to take social/cultural perspectives responsibly”).

These routines provided a scaffold to help children think more deeply about characters and themes. They encouraged them to consider what the people in the text might be feeling, what perspectives or choices were open to them, and what bigger message the author might be trying to communicate.

So, what effect did the thinking routines have?

New Group Reading Test (NGRT) results showed measurable gains, particularly in inference and prediction. In the class that consistently embedded thinking routines, inference accuracy rose from 35 per cent to 61 per cent over seven months, the strongest progress across all groups.

Prediction outcomes improved by an average of 4.5 standard age score (SAS) points, compared with 1.8, 1.2 and 2.0 in the other classes. While all groups made some progress, the contrast underlined how consistency of implementation made the real difference.

The success of the approach was also evident in lessons, where children began to justify their answers with evidence, connect ideas across a text and even use the routines’ language spontaneously in other subjects.

Embedding metacognition

The next step is to make sure that this way of thinking becomes embedded, rather than something that fades away when a new strategy is introduced. The idea is that, over time, children will develop a toolkit of thinking routines that they can draw on in different situations, in lessons and beyond that, too.

For colleagues considering this approach, my advice would be to start with just one routine and model it clearly. Be explicit about why you are using it, so children see that the goal is not only to find the “correct” answer but also to develop their approach to thinking about what they read.

Give them time to practise the routines, and celebrate the process of thinking as much as the product.

The results won’t be immediate, but if you can establish this culture in your classroom, and eventually across a school, you can be confident that your pupils will leave you as better learners and better people.

What excites me most is that this approach is not only about raising attainment but also about nurturing qualities like curiosity and compassion.

In a world where we are often pressured by coverage and testing, it is refreshing to be reminded that the most valuable thing we can give our pupils is the ability to think well.

Aaron Regan is a Year 5 class teacher, curriculum leader and metacognition lead at The British International School Abu Dhabi