Students had difficulty at first learning these metacognitive comprehension-checking activities, but with practice became quite adept. In the classroom these students jumped from the 7th to the 50th percentile in comparison with other seventh graders in their school. These effects endured for at least six months, and the authors report that the students typically not only learned the comprehension-fostering strategies, but also internalized them as part of their own cognitive processes for reading. Her analysis highlights the importance of metacognition in learning of all kinds. An example that illustrates the importance of such knowledge is the concept of a word.
Young children are unable to separate words from their meanings.
Metalinguistic tasks such as these are part of reading readiness batteries, she reports, and training in such concepts as word and syllable helps poor readers to learn to read. A developmentally based approach to the problem of instructional design. He demonstrates how to assess working memory and how to determine the amount of working memory needed to do solve a particular class of problems. He also reports research by A.P. Gold in teaching ratio problems of the kind commonly taught in sixth-grade mathematics using the same method. Teaching for, of, and about thinking.