The National Reading Panel, convened on behalf of Congress in 1997 to assess the effectiveness of various approaches to teaching children to read, suggests in a 58-page teacher's guide intitled "Put Reading First: The Research Building Blocks for Teaching Children to Read" that students' reading comprehension can be greatly improved by intructing them to use specific strategies that will actively increase their ability to understand and retain what they read. The true reason for reading any text is comprehension. Just as vocabulary can be taught, the ability to thouroughly understand what one reads can be taught. While there are several strategies that may be used to improve a students reading comprehension, there are six which have the most solid scientific support. These six strategies are monitoring comprehension, using graphic or sementic organizers, presenting students with questions which they must answer, instructing students to come up with their own questions, teaching students to recognize story structure, and developing effective ways to summarize long bodies of text. Students can and should be taught to monitor their own comprehension of text. Students who are effective at monitoring their understanding of what they read are able to identify what they do and do not understand and are much more able to use appropriate strategies to resolve problems in comprehension. Specific strategies which students may use when applying comprehension monitoring include stating where in the text a difficulty occours, identifying exactly what the difficulty is, restating the difficult passage in their own words, looking back through the text in order to find clues which they might have missed the first time it was read, and looking forward in the text for information which might help them to resolve the difficulty. The use of graphic or semantic organizers help