1

Reading: What Else Matters Besides Strategies and Skills?

Amy Sorensen
NNRPDP and The University of Nevada Las Vegas

CILR 607

May 11, 2020

 2

Teachers are always on the lookout for the next great strategy, skill or program that will

elevate their students from struggling readers to superstars. It’s no wonder in the current climate

of high stakes testing with funding and school ratings bound to those testing scores. In Reading:

What Else Matters Besides Strategies and Skills, authors Affleblack, Cho, Kim, Crassas and

Doyle (2013) suggest that the “Big 5” (phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary and

comprehension) aren’t the only things students need to become proficient readers.

Summary

In Reading: What Else Matters Besides Strategies and Skills, the authors suggest that

besides cognitive reading skills, students also need affective reading skills to support their

growing abilities. These skills include metacognition, motivation and engagement, epistemic

beliefs and high self-efficacy.

The authors systematically discuss why cognitive skills are not enough for developing

readers and how using these four factors in the classroom will help students develop into

successful readers. Additionally, the authors highlight best practices in using these four factors

that demonstrate how teachers can teach these skills in their classrooms. Finally, they spotlight

how “when we rely on test scores to demonstrate “superior” approaches to reading instruction,

we will continue to be locked into a system that uses only cognitive strategy and skill as

evidence” (p. 447) for reading growth and capacity.

Critique

In Reading: What Else Matters Besides Strategies and Skills the authors highlighted that

as educators, we tend to ignore metacognition, motivation and engagement, epistemic beliefs and

high self-efficacy as important factors to be taught and supported in the classroom along with the

cognitive reading skills. They did an excellent job highlighting how each of the areas could be
 3

taught within the classroom and what that instruction might look like. However, these scenarios

were not complete. The authors should have used an additional scenario describing what

implementation of all four strategies might look like. Also, the authors only provided one

suggestion of how to implement these factors within the classroom, where having more than one

idea would be helpful to get a broader picture of what using these factors in the classroom might

look like.

The authors highlighted how a teacher might use metacognition, motivation and

engagement, epistemic beliefs and high self-efficacy to improve reading performance in the

classroom. They chose to describe each of these factors in differing grade levels, which help

elementary and intermediate teachers think about how they might teach these factors within the

classroom at various grade-levels. They suggest that “metacognition, motivation and

engagement, epistemic beliefs and self-efficacy have considerable influence on how our students

grow toward accomplished reading” (p. 442). By showing how these factors could be taught

within the classroom, they were able to highlight the benefits and structure needed to help

students become better readers.

While it was helpful to see each of these factors highlighted in isolation, it would have

been helpful to see how a teacher could use these strategies in concert with one another to best

support struggling readers, who likely have need of more than one of these strategies. In

Chapter nine of Best Practices in Literacy Instruction, they suggest that “isolated strategy use

focus on teaching students the ‘strategy’ rather than teaching student ‘to be strategic’.

Subsequently, teachers have come to focus on strategies as things to be taught, rather than

actions to be fostered. The difference between teaching students a ‘strategy’ and teaching

students to be ‘strategic’ is that strategic actions require intentionality” (p. 228). When fostering
 4

that intentionality, it is important to understand how to best support students with a variety of

strategies to meet their metacognitive, motivation and engagement, epistemic beliefs and self-

efficacy needs, more than just one snapshot of a practice teachers are employing in isolation.

Therefore, providing teachers with additional ideas or suggestions would help teachers identify

how to use these strategies to best help struggling readers build the cognitive as well as affective

skills they need to be successful readers.

Reflection

Overall, I enjoyed this article and liked the way that the author highlighted practices to

help students build their affective reading skills. I do agree that there is more to reading than just

cognitive reading skills, but it is easy to focus exclusively on those skills to help struggling

readers. I recently spoke with our second-grade teacher who said that her students could read

above grade level, but that they were struggling with comprehending what they are reading. It

has led me to think through the idea of how do we best support all readers to think critically and

feel like they are capable of doing the reading they are being asked to do?

After reading this article and our textbook, I am planning lessons that will begin teaching

students how to be strategic in their reading. I’ve already started mapping out a lesson using Tic-

Tac-Toe to explain strategy and merge it with students using strategies during their reading. It

also made me consider how I build critical thinking skills with my students and how I will

provide additional perspectives on the same events within our social studies units. Finally, I have

started highlighting the types of questions that I will start asking my students to help build their

metacognition and understanding that we use strategies to be strategic, not just to learn strategies.
 5

References

Afflerbach, P., Cho, B.-Y., Kim, J.-Y., Crassas, M. E., & Doyle, B. (2013). Reading: What Else

Matters Besides Strategies and Skills? The Reading Teacher, 66(6), 440–448. doi:

10.1002/trtr.1146

Morrow, L. M., & Gambrell, L. B. (2019). Best practices in literacy instruction. New York: The

Guilford Press.