Journal of Education & Social Policy

Self-Reported Reading Strategies of U.S. College Students and Implications for Institutions of Higher Education
Carrie Anna Courtad Ph.D; Catherine Wigent, Ph.D.

Abstract
Little is known about the metacognitive strategies college students are using for university level reading and discipline specific reading. As students progress through their education and become more skilled in their respective fields, their reading strategies should improve and be more flexible according to research that indicates that older, more experience readers have more evolved and flexible reading strategies (Pressley & Lundberg, 2008) This study focuses on the self-reported strategies used by college students in relation to the expert reader. A mass invitation to participate in the survey Metacognitive Awareness of Reading Strategies Inventory (MARSI) developed by Mokhtari and Reichard (2002) was sent to a large public university in the Midwest. The MARSI is intended to measure the self-reported reading strategies used for academic reading and was validated with adolescent and adult readers (2002).This study examines the self-reported reading strategies of U.S. college students to determine if field of study or number of college credits impacted their use of reading strategies. These results indicated statistically significant differences in the reading strategies used by students’ disciplines.

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