Influence of Cognitive Reading Strategies for Improving Comprehension Skills in Primary Education Students

Learning to read is not an automatic process that is carried out as a consequence of the simple action of decoding graphic elements, but an interactive process between the reader and the text that involves the participation of various levels of cognitive complexity that intervene by integrating graphic, semantic, syntactic, pragmatic, and interpretative information, which requires teaching methodologies that encourage the active participation of the reader and the implementation of a series of cognitive actions. However, and contrary to this postulate, the general tendency in many cases to facilitate reading comprehension skills in the classroom focuses on the response to a series of questions after reading the texts. The aim of this study is to find out whether proposals that promote cognitive operations aimed at extracting the relevant information from the text together with the formulation of questions of different types (literal, inferential, reorganizing, and critical) improve the comprehension capacity of expository texts in students who complete the primary education stage. The study involved 214 students from different schools, aged between 11 and 12. A quasi-experimental design of comparison between groups with pretest and posttest measures was used. The results obtained show that the exercise of macro-rules together with the formulation of questions contributes to improving students' reading ability.