Reading comprehension involves two basic cognitive steps: 1) word recognition of written symbols, and 2) fusion or interpretation of those symbols to construct meaning. There are four levels of comprehension - literal, interpretative, applied, and evaluative. Meta-cognition, or self-aware reading, is characterized by self-awareness, careful reading and retention, making assumptions or hypotheses before reading, and deliberately reflecting on, questioning, classifying, summarizing and predicting the text using techniques like SQ3R (survey, question, read, recite, review).