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Reciprocal teaching is an instructional procedure designed to Reciprocal teaching is an instructional approach that features "guided practice in applying simple, concrete strategies to the task of text comprehension" (Brown & Palincsar, 1989, p. 413). Reciprocal teaching was first described by Palincsar (1982) and Palincsar and Brown (1984), and the description was extended in their later articles, particularly in Palincsar (1986) and Brown and Palincsar (1989). This is a review of the studies that have used reciprocal teaching as an instructional procedure to improve student comprehension of text.
Until the late 1970s, students were seldom taught cognitive strategies that could assist them in reading. In a classic observational study of reading comprehension instruction, Durkin (1979) noted that of the 4,469 minutes of grade 4 reading instruction she observed, only 20 minutes were spent in comprehension instruction by the teacher. Durkin noted that teachers spent a great deal of instructional time asking students questions, but they spent little time teaching students comprehension strategies they could use to answer the questions. Duffy, Lanier, and Roehler (1980) noted a similar lack of comprehension instruction in elementary classrooms:
There is little evidence of instruction of any kind. Teachers spend most of their time assigning activities, monitoring to be sure the pupils are on task, directing recitation sessions to assess how well children are doing and providing corrective feedback in response to pupil errors. Seldom does one observe teaching in which a teacher presents a skill, a strategy, or a process to pupils, shows them how to do it, provides assistance as they initiate attempts to perform the task and assures that they can be successful. (p. 4)
In the late 1970s, investigators began to teach students specific cognitive strategies, such as question generation or summarization, that they could use to help improve their reading comprehension (Paris, Cross, & Lipson, 1984; Raphael & Pearson, 1985; Alvermann, 1981). Cognitive strategy instruction has also been taught in mathematics problem solving (Schoenfeld, 1985), physics problem solving (Larkin & Reif, 1976), and writing (Englert & Raphael, 1989; Scardamalia & Bereiter, 1985). Reciprocal teaching is in this tradition of cognitive strategy instruction.
Reciprocal teaching refers to a set of learning conditions in which children "first experience a particular set of cognitive activities in the presence...