Comprehension

What is Comprehension?

Comprehension is the process of finding and creating meaning from interacting with written language.

Being able to understand, remember, and retell a story that you have read is an example of comprehension.

Why is Comprehension Important?

At this point, students are able to decode the texts, but it is important that students construct meaning from what they read. Simply being able to read a story does not mean that the student understands it. Having a better grasp on how to read and understand meaning of larger amounts of words helps students to quickly assign meaning to text.

Assessing Comprehension

Question Answer Relationships (QAR)

QAR is the relationship between the question asked about a book and wether the answer is in the text, or from your head. Students determining if the answer to a question can be found in the text or if it required higher levels of thinking shows if they understood and remember the information from the text, or if it is being confused with things like background knowledge or illustrations.

For example: The Three Little Pigs

Question: What was the first pig's house made of?

Answer: Straw --> this is an answer that can be found in the text and is an answer that reflects good comprehension of the story.

Question: What was the first pig's house made of?

Answer: Mud --> this an answer that is not in the text, and reflects background knowledge of pigs enjoying mud, not comprehension of the story.

The questions that are asked will reflect the different levels of Bloom's Taxonomy, or the hierachal classification of educational learning objectives. Remembering, understanding, applying, analyzing, evaluating, creating.

Teaching Comprehension

Graphic Organizers

(narrative texts)

Graphic organizers, or ways to organize story events, helps students to arrange their thoughts on the story. There are many different types of graphic organizers such as Somebody Wanted But So Then (SWBST), Beginning Middle and End, and Story Grammar, simply listing the parts of the story.

Example: The Three Little Pigs

Somebody - The big bad wolf

Wanted - to eat the pigs

But - the pigs went into their houses

So - he blew the houses made of straw and sticks down, and the pigs ran to the third house

Then - the wolf couldn't blow down the brick house, so the pigs lived

This strategy helps students with summarization and remembering the parts of a story.

Activating and Connecting to Background Knowledge

(informational texts)

In order to make deeper connections with the text and understand key vocabulary, students should bring background knowledge to the table. This can be something they have learned or worked on in the past, or just random experiences from their lives. Asking questions, doing a picture walk (looking just at the pictures in a book), or using an anticipation guide can be useful when trying to activate a student's background knowledge. Some students may not have any background knowledge on a topic that is in the text, so they will need help creating some prior knowledge in order to make sense of the text.

For example, when reading a book about life in the 20th century, if a student has never read, seen, or heard anything about the 20th century they would not have any background knowledge to bring to the text. By explicitly teaching about a subject before reading, using things like hands on activities, videos, field trips, or explicitly telling, this student can then make connections with the text and comprehend it better.

State Standards

SL.K.1 Participation in collaborative conversations with diverse partners about kindergarten topics and texts with peers and adults in small and larger groups.

SL.K.2 Confirm understanding of a text read aloud or information presented orally or through other media by asking questions about key details and requesting clarification if something is not understood.

RL.K.1 With prompting and support, ask and answer questions about key details in a text.

RL.K.2 With prompting and support, retell familiar stories, including key details.

RL.1.3. Describe character, settings, and major events in a story, using key details.

RL.1.13 With prompting and support, read and comprehend high quality dramas, prose and poetry of appropriate quantitative and qualitative complexity for Grade 1.

RL.2.5 Describe the overall structure of a story, including describing how the beginning introduces the story and the ending concludes the action.

RL.3.2 Recount stories, including fables, folktales, and myths from diverse cultures; determine the central message, lesson, or moral and explain how it is conveyed through key details in the text.

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