Being able to comprehend what you read is one of the most important pieces of learning how to read. If you don't understand what you have read, you will not enjoy a story, connect a story to your own life, or be able to read to learn.
"Comprehension is the ultimate goal of reading. Student who easily comprehend what they just read are more likely to enjoy reading. They are also more effective reading, which helps them academically and in their personal life." Nebraska Reads
There are 6 comprehension strategies that teachers model for students:
Our brains are like file cabinets. When we see something familiar, our brains pull up a file on everything we already know about the topic. This helps us understand the story better or get our brains ready to learn! Previewing the text opens the file cabinet (our schema) of what we already know and helps us understand what we are going to read.
Readers use information from the text along with their background knowledge to make predictions as they read. Their background knowledge helps them make predictions and revise their predictions as they read.
Identifying the main idea and summarizing happens when students determine what is important and then state it in their own words. Graphic organizers can help students with this process. Story elements (characters, setting, events, problem and solution) should be told as part of the process. During this process the child should also determine the author’s purpose in writing the text. Did the author write the story to entertain, persuade, or to help the reader learn something - inform? Graphic organizers can also help students with text structure differences between fiction and non-fiction text.
Asking and answering questions about text helps readers engage with the text. When readers stop and ask questions it helps them think about the ideas in the text. It helps students concentrate on the meaning of text. Questioning also helps readers focus on the text....when they are thinking about their thinking, this is called metacognition. It is possible to read and not think while you are reading, because you are thinking about something else, or you have read too many words and you don't know their meaning. You are reading, but you are not comprehending.
Readingrockets.org describes the Question-Answer Relationship strategy (QAR) which encourages students to learn how to answer questions better. Students are asked to indicate whether the information they used to answer questions about the text was textually explicit information (information that was directly stated in the text), textually implicit information (information that was implied in the text), or information entirely from the student's own background knowledge.
There are four different types of questions:
----Reading Rockets.org
An inference is an assumption that the reader can make about something that is not explicitly stated in the text. An inference happens when students "read between the lines." Students have to draw on their background knowledge and the clues the author gives to make an inference. Making inferences tends to be one of the hardest strategies for students to master.
When students visualize, they create mental images in their heads of what the setting looks like or what the characters look like in the story. Visualizing helps students recall important information (Pressley, 1977). Students can use the illustrations given, or create their own mental images if there are no illustrations. Adults visualize a great deal when they are reading. This is usually why when you see a movie based on a book, the movie is never as good! Usually, the movie is not how you pictured the story in your head, because characters and settings will look different.
Use to compare and contrast two topics or stories.
Used to order the sequence of events or steps in a story.
KWLChartFREEBIE.pdfThere are three steps in the K-W-L process (Ogle, 1986):
After all of the students have read the text, the teacher leads a discussion of the questions and answers.
For a complete list of free graphic organizers, visit:
Bibliography
Ogle, D. M. (1986). K-W-L: A teaching model that develops active reading of expository text. The Reading Teacher 38(6), pp. 564–570.
Pressley, M. (1977). Imagery and children’s learning: Putting the picture in developmental perspective. Review of Educational Research 47, pp. 586–622.
Read-At-Home Plan for Student Success, Nebraska Department of Education.