Comprehension

          Comprehension is the reason for reading, and helps students understand, retain, and communicate. It can be improved through instruction/ explicit instruction that should begin in the primary grades. Furthermore, comprehension is important because it is making meaning of the words one is decoding, giving purpose to reading a text. Active readers especially contain comprehension skills because they understand the purpose of the text they are reading, and can apply prior knowledge, and/or know when they are experiencing comprehension problems.



Strategies of Teaching/Activities/Vocabulary:



Teacher modeling - Strategy, usually by “thinking aloud” while reading the text that the students are using



Cooperative learning groups - Students work together to understand content, helping each other learn and apply strategies

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Reciprocal teaching - An instructional method that involves guided practice of reading comprehension using four concrete steps of clarification, questioning, summarizing and predicting. Click           for more information about reciprocal teaching.

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QAR (Question Answer Relationship) - A common way of thinking and talking about sources of information for answering questions.  These are two core questions. The first is, "Is it a question I need to find in the book?" If it is, the student then determines if the answer is right there, or if they need to think and search across multiple paragraphs or pages to find the answer.  The second question is. "Is this a question I need to answer in my head?"  If so, the student then determines if it can be answered on their own or if the student needs to infer information from what the author has written.

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"Fix-up" strategies - help students to fix any comprehension problems they have.  Some examples include: identifying where the difficulty occurs, identifying what the difficulty is, restating the difficult sentence or passage in their own words, looking back through the text, and looking forward in the text for information that might help them to resolve the difficulty.



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In addition, there are six comprehension strategies that include:

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Monitoring comprehension - Knowing when you understand what you read and when you do not. "Fix-up" strategies can be used when a student realizes that they do not understand what they are reading.



Utilizing graphic and semantic organizers - Graphic organizers illustrate concepts and interrelationships among concepts in a text using diagrams or other pictorial devices. Semantic are similar to graphic organizers, but they look somewhat like a spider web.  Lines connect a central concept to a variety of related ideas or events.



Answering questions - Teacher questioning strongly supports and advances student’s learning from reading because they give students a purpose for reading, focus students’ attention on what they are to learn, help students to think actively as they read, encourage students to monitor their comprehension, and help students to review content and relate what they have learned to what they already know.



Generating questions -  Teaching students to ask their own questions improves their active processing of the text and comprehension.



Recognizing story structure - Recognizing story structure (the way the content and events of a story are organized into a plot) gives students great appreciation, understanding and memory for stories.

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Summarizing - A synthesis of the important ideas in a text requires students to determine what is important in what they read, and condense the information.

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          Each of these strategies organizes the information presented in a text in a different way to map it out for the students. These strategies should first be modeled and explained by the teacher, and then have the students attempt it with guidance, until they are finally ready to create them on their own. This will help students gain comprehension skills because they may understand and be able to organize information presented in a text.

 

Assessment:

 

Comprehension can be assessed by asking students to summarize key events in a text, asking them to answer or create questions about a text, or to have them explain the text in their own words.  Many of the above strategies can be used to assess a student's level of comprehension.