Teachers often assign double-entry journal writing to accompany course readings. Often, the focus of these "Quotes and Notes" or "Dialectical Response" journals is the content of the reading and students’ affective or personal responses to it. The Metacognitive Double-Entry Journal is a twist on this familiar practice.
As teachers embed reading comprehension instruction into content-area teaching in courses like history, journals like these give students practice applying comprehension strategies and assessing their impact on understanding. Students paraphrase the content of a text in their own words in the left-hand column. In the right-hand column students are metacognitive about their reading, detailing how they figured out what the passage may mean.
Teachers can follow this assignment up with small group or whole class discussions about the possible meanings of a text passage as well as how students are problem-solving to make meaning with the passage. As students become accustomed to sharing their reading comprehension processes with one another, teachers can adapt this strategy to focus on other important aspects of reading. In history, for example, students might be assigned different roles in a historical period and asked to read the same passage from that point of view, with follow up discussions across roles to highlight the different passage meanings students construct when they read from a particular point of view.
