This time of year when we are all analyzing summative achievement data, it brings attention to the ongoing challenges our students have with Reading Comprehension. We have been working with a variety of school districts to address these challenges and to help teachers become innovative in reading instruction. It's not just enough to read and ask a few comprehension questions. To truly comprehend at an analytical level, we need to be intentional and strategic.
Over the next week, we will be posting about some research-based Reading Comprehension strategies that have proven to work with all types of learners! Here is our first take!
Comprehension strategies are conscious plans — sets of steps that good readers use to make sense of a text. Comprehension strategy instruction helps students become purposeful, active readers who are in control of their own reading comprehension.
Research shows that explicit teaching techniques are particularly effective for comprehension strategy instruction. In explicit comprehension instruction, teachers tell readers why and when they should use strategies, what strategies to use, and how to apply them.
The steps of explicit comprehension instruction typically include direct explanation, teacher modeling, guided practice, and application.
· Direct explanation: The teacher explains to students why the strategy helps comprehension and when to apply the strategy.
· Modeling: The teacher models, or demonstrates, how to apply the strategy, usually by "thinking aloud" while reading the text that the students are using.
· Guided practice: The teacher guides and assists students as they learn how and when to apply the strategy.
· Application: The teacher helps students practice the strategy until they can apply it independently.
Effective comprehension strategy instruction can be accomplished through cooperative learning, which involves students working together as partners or in small groups on clearly defined tasks. Cooperative learning instruction has been used successfully to teach comprehension strategies. Students work together to understand texts, helping each other learn and apply comprehension strategies. Teachers help students learn to work in groups. Teachers also provide modeling of the comprehension strategies.
While there are a plethora of names and strategies associated with reading comprehension, research for the last fifty years can be synthesized into the following strategies:
- Monitoring
- Metacognition
- Graphic Organizers
- Question-Answer-Relationship
- Generating Questions
- Classroom Discussion
- Annotating Text
Today we will discuss the first strategy, Monitoring. Stay tuned for more information and great ideas in the week ahead!
Monitoring
Students who are good at monitoring their comprehension know when they understand what they read and when they do not. They have strategies to "fix" problems in their understanding as the problems arise. Research shows that teaching monitoring skills can help students become better at monitoring their comprehension.
Comprehension monitoring instruction teaches students to:
- Be aware of what they do understand
- Identify what they do not understand
- Use appropriate strategies to resolve problems in comprehension
Monitoring strategies that have proven to be effective for reading comprehension are:
· Story Maps: A story map is a strategy that uses a visual organizer created by the reader during the reading to help students learn the elements of literature. By identifying the characters, plot, setting, problem and solution, students read carefully to learn the details. There are many different types of story map visual organizers. The most basic focus on the beginning, middle, and end of the story. More advanced organizers focus more on plot or character traits.
· Concept Maps: A visual organizer that can enrich students' understanding of informational text. Using this type of organizer, students think about the information in several ways. Most concept map organizers engage students in answering questions such as, “who, what, when, where, why, how, examples, etc.”.
· Verbal Summarizing: Summarizing teaches students how to discern the most important ideas in a text, how to ignore irrelevant information, and how to integrate the central ideas in a meaningful way. While we often ask students to write a summary, we often do not take enough time to provide opportunities for students to verbally summarize what they have understood during and after the reading. Teaching students to verbally summarize improves their memory for what was read. Summarization strategies can be used in every content area.
· Think-Alouds: Think-alouds have been described as "eavesdropping on someone's thinking." With this strategy, teachers verbalize aloud while reading a selection orally. Their verbalizations include describing things they're doing as they read to monitor their comprehension. The purpose of the think-aloud strategy is to model for students how skilled readers construct meaning from a text. Students implement think-alouds after the teacher has effectively modeled them.
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