The purpose of this article was to analyze whether students in the first grade of primary school who were taught using a direct instruction method improved their use of reading comprehension strategies and their text recall. The participants were 48 firstcourse Primary School students. The design was quasiexperimental with a pretest and two posttest measures in both groups (control and experimental). The instrument applied to collect the data was the Contextualized Scale for the Evaluation of Learning Strategies. The findings favor direct instruction in first course. Thus, in the majority of the students who participated in our direct instruction method, the results showed an improvement in reading comprehension strategies and text recall.