A key tenet of being strategic stemmed from the work of developmental psychologists such as John Flavell (1977), who introduced the notion of meta memory—a precursor to metacognition that became synonymous with the ability to read strategically across a range of situations independently. In turn, the focus shifted to a learner’s self-awareness—the ability to judge and read a task or situation, to bring strategies to the task to address that task and its specific features, to adapt to circumstances, monitor and adjust progress, and consider a task’s relevance to one’s world. As the focus shifted to helping students learn how to learn, the goals of reading development extended to developing students’ metacognitive skills and strategies that they could in turn employ independently and across different circumstances. While the notion of independence in reading was not new, its marriage to reading comprehension was (Side comment 11 2 a 11). ...

The cognitive revolution of the 1970s extended beyond studies of readers making meaning for a particular text to addressing the question: Is it possible to improve a reader’s comprehension—for texts that they had not yet read? The significance of this question should not be underestimated. Inherent in asking this question is a challenge to the notion that intelligence is fixed and possibly innate. It raises the possibility that intelligence, or at least some important self-learning processes, could be improved for transfer to future learning situations. But what would it take? Was it tied to teaching certain related elements such as vocabulary? Did it entail developing background knowledge? Should we teach students how to follow and connect ideas to infer, evaluate, synthesize, etc.? How might we do so, and how would we judge when we had succeeded? It seemed the real test would be to measure readers’ abilities to enlist and apply these strategies across various situations, on their own or independently. Such a standard went beyond improving test scores. ...