Comprehension: The Essence of Reading

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Comprehension The Essence of Reading

• SBRR and Standards-Based Instruction

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What is Comprehension?

• Comprehension is the reason for reading!
• Allows children to glean meaning from text
• Is purposeful and active

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Reading Researchers Have FoundThat

• Comprehension is critical for academic learning
  for all subject areas.
• Three major themes
• Vocabulary development and instruction play an
  important role in comprehension.
• The reader needs to be actively engaged in an
  intentional and thoughtful interaction with the
  text.
• The more teachers know about strategy instruction
  the better the student comprehends and
  demonstrate higher reading achievement.

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Effective comprehension strategy instruction is
explicit/direct!

• Direct explanation
• Modeling
• Guided practice
• Application
• Should be done before, during and after reading

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Effective Comprehension Instruction Can Be
Achieved Through Cooperative Learning and
by helping readers use strategies flexibly and in
combination.
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What is SBRR?

• SBRRScientifically Based Reading Research
• Can be found in
• National Reading Panel Report
• Put Reading First
• Current books/articles

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6 SBRR Identified by the NRP!

• Comprehension monitoring
• Graphic and Semantic Organizers
• Question Answering
• Question Generation
• Story Structure
• Summarization

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Think Alouds by Roger Farr

• Includes the following strategies
• Comprehension monitoring
• Question generation
• Summarization
• ?

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How to Think Aloud

• Read a selection aloud to your students,
• stopping as you go to think aloud.
• Share your predicting and reading strategies
• by telling them to your students
• guessing at the meaning of words
• using background information
• making predictions
• putting yourself in the text
• summarizing as you read
• re-reading and fix-up strategies
• changing your mind, etc

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• 2. After Reading, ask your students what you
  were telling them about as you read.
• 3. Make a list on the chalkboard as the children
  describe how you read.
• 4. Have the students use the checklist to keep
  track of your reading strategies as you read a
  second story.
• 5. Have a student model the think-aloud process
  for the class
• 6. Use shared reading, paired reading, and
  dramatic reading to practice and develop the
  thinking strategies.

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Reciprocal Teaching a method that embraces
several of the SBRR strategies (by Palinscar
Brown)

• Strategies include
• Predicting and clarifying for meaning and phonics
  (both elements of comprehension monitoring)
• Summarizing
• Question generating
• (Soar to Success)

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QARQuestion and Answer Relationships

• Strategies include
• Question Answering
• Question Generation
• Monitoring
• Graphic Organizers

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• Directions
• 1. Choose a text. fiction or non-fiction.
• 2. Write questions based on the text. Your
  questions should fall into one of the following
  three categories
• CATEGORY 1RIGHT THERE The information that
  students will need to answer the question is
  right there in the text. 
• CATEGORY 2THINK AND SEARCH The information
  that students will need to answer the question is
  implied in the text, but students will have to
  combine ideas in the text with prior knowledge to
  form inferences. 

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• CATEGORY 3IN MY HEAD The information that
  students will need to answer the question is
  entirely in the readers mind.
• 3.  Go over the questions with student before
  they begin reading the text. Thinking about the
  questions while they are reading will provide
  students with a concrete purpose for reading.
• 4. After students have read the text, provide
  explicit instruction about each of the three
  categories above.

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• 5. Have students answer the questions and
  indicate which category of information they
  needed to answer each. Students can use the
  following codes for each category instead of
  writing out the category name   
• RT (Right There)
• TS (Think and Search)
• IH (In my Head)
• 6. After students have answered all questions
  and indicated category codes for each, discuss
  responses and categories as a group.

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Example

• Jeff had lived in Martinsville his entire life.
  But tomorrow, Jeff and his family would be moving
  200 miles away to Petersburg. Jeff hated the idea
  of having to move. He would be leaving behind his
  best friend, Rick, the baseball team he had
  played on for the last two years, and the big oak
  tree in his backyard, where he liked to sit and
  think. And to make matters worse, he was moving
  on his birthday! Jeff would be thirteen tomorrow.
  He was going to be a teenager! He wanted to
  spend the day with his friends, not watching his
  house being packed up and put on a truck. Jeff
  thought that moving was a horrible way to spend
  his birthday. What about a party? What about
  spending the day with his friends? What about
  what he wanted? But that was just the problem. No
  one ever asked Jeff what he wanted.    

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Read the questions and decide whether the answer
is RT, TS, or IH

• How long had Jeff lived in Martinsville?
• What is the name of the town where Jeff and his
  family are moving?
• Where is a place at your house where you like to
  sit and think?
• Does Jeff like playing on the baseball team he
  has played on for the last two years?
• Have you ever moved from one city to another?
• What is Jeffs best friends name?

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Check your answers!

• How long had Jeff lived in Martinsville? (Think
  and Search)
• What is the name of the town where Jeff and his
  family are moving? (Right There)
• Where is a place at your house where you like to
  sit and think? (In my Head)
• Does Jeff like playing on the baseball team he
  has played on for the last two years? (Think and
  Search)
• Have you ever moved from one city to another? (In
  my Head)
• What is Jeffs best friends name? (Right There)

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Keep in mind

• Sometimes the category for a response is not
  clear-cut
• Single correct category not needed
• Students should be able to support their choice
• More is learned from the discussion

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Anticipation Guides

• Strategies include
• Comprehension monitoring
• Question Generation
• ?

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Using Anticipation Guides

• Before Children use prior knowledge to answer
  true/false questions prior to reading a passage
• During Read the passage/monitoring reading by
  looking for answers to T/F questions
• After Review answers after reading, generate new
  questions

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Sum It UpSummarizingRaymond C. Jones,
rjones_at_readingquest.org

• Choose an article and Sum It Up sheet.
• Read the entire article and, as you read, list
  the main idea words on the Sum It Up sheet.
• Imagine that each word is worth ten cents. Write
  a summary of the article using as many of the
  main idea words as possible. Put your complete
  sentence answers under the circled amount, using
  one word in each blank.

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Semantic Feature AnalysisGraphic and Semantic
Organizers

• Strategies include
• Graphic and semantic organizers
• Question answering
• Question generation
• Summarization
• SFA is a chart or grid to examine related
  concepts
• Concepts are listed down the left side and
  criteria or features are listed across the top
• If the concept is associated with the feature it
  gets a where the column and row intersect. If
  it is not associated with the feature it receives
  a

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Government SFA
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Government SFA

• What do all of these presidents have in common?
• Which president served in congress?
• Which two presidents were democrats?
• Which two presidents served more than one term?
• Which president was a movie star?

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Story Structure (Non-Fiction)

• Seven basic structures of expository text
  (Heller, 1995)
• Definition
• Description/list structure
• Order/sequence (collection, time order, or
  listing)
• Classification
• Compare/Contrast
• Analysis
• Persuasion
• http//www.nea.org/reading/usingtextstructure.
• Html
• http//www.middleweb.com/ReadWrkshp/RWdownld/retel
  lnonfictrubric.pdf

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Ryder and Graves (1998) designed questions that
can be used for each type of text structure.

• For example
• A question for the definition structure could be
  What is being defined?
• A question for description structure could be
  What is being described? What did we learn about
  the person, animal, or object?
• A question for classification could be What
  categories will you use to classify these items
  into categories? Or How can these items be put
  into categories?

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Final words!

• Any comprehension strategy that includes any of
  the big 7 will be successful.
• Make sure all comprehension lessons follow the
  BDA format.
• Scaffold students until they internalize the
  strategies. Explain, model, guide and provide
  practice, let them fly on their own!
• Provide materials that motivate them and that
  they can navigate successfully.

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Two Award Winning Favorites!

• Effective Reading Strategies Teaching Children
  Who Find Reading Difficult (Rasinski Padak)
• Strategies That Work (Harvey Goudvis)