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reading strategies and, in turn, teach students reading strategies through the pro-
cess of self-explanation. SERT was inspired by findings reported by Chi et al.
(1994) indicating that self-explanation improves comprehension and problem solv-
ing, but that the benefits of self-explanation are reserved for those who do it well.
At the same time, studies in the area of reading comprehension had pointed toward
strategies that improve comprehension (e.g., Brown & Palincsar, 1982; Palincsar &
Brown, 1984). SERT was designed to merge self-explanation and reading strategy
training so that students could learn how to better self-explain texts and, at the same
time, practice using reading comprehension strategies by self-explaining texts.
SERT was initially implemented within a one-on-one intervention program and
eventually involved into a classroom-based intervention. The following sections
describe these two programs and discuss studies investigating their effectiveness
in improving students' comprehension of challenging text.
SERT: One-on-One
SERT (McNamara, 2004b) was first developed as a laboratory-based intervention,
including two sessions and three testing sessions. The training was delivered to each
student individually by an experimenter. Of course, one could imagine the same type
of training being delivered by tutors to individual students.
SERT Introduction
The first phase of SERT is the introduction, which covers the use of self-explanation
as a reading comprehension strategy and includes six reading strategies. For each
strategy, the experimenter follows a script in which the strategy is defined and exam-
ples are provided of the strategies being used within self-explanations. The strategies
include (1)
comprehension monitoring
;(2)
paraphrasing
, or restating information
in their own words; (3)
prediction
, or predicting what information may be provided
by the text next or what may happen next; (4)
bridging
, or making connections
between the ideas in the text; (5)
elaboration
using their own domain knowledge;
and (6)
logical inferences
, or using logic, general world knowledge, and common
sense to make sense of the text. Within the introduction, students learn what the
strategies are, why the strategies will help them with their reading comprehension,
and examples of each of the strategies used in self-explanations.
SERT Practice and Demonstration
In the second phase of training, the students practice self-explaining four science
texts. The student reads the text and self-explains aloud to the experimenter or tutor.
The tutor scaffolds the student when additional self-explanation is necessary. After
reading and self-explaining each text and answering questions about it, the student
views a video of a peer-student self-explaining the same science text. The videos
are stopped at various “stop points” and the student is asked to identify the strategy
