This study analyses the effectiveness of adaptive formative feedback to boost strategic search decisions and performance when students are asked to answer a set of questions in a task‐oriented reading situation. We compared automatic feedback that included information about the right answer with feedback that also included the connection between the students' strategic search decisions and their performance. Ninety‐two high school students read two non‐continuous texts. They received feedback during a training phase, and then they read and also received feedback with a similar text in a final phase. Text and questions were presented using a new computer‐based technology that provided automatic adaptive feedback depending on the experimental condition: right‐answer feedback, strategic‐search‐decisions feedback and placebo feedback. We found that strategic‐search‐decisions feedback improved strategic decisions over right‐answer and placebo feedback in the final text, which in turn improved question‐answering performance. Some positive effects were also found during training. These results open new possibilities to adaptive automatic procedures to teach task‐oriented reading skills to students.