After Reading

Students need to be reminded that rereading is an essential part of comprehension. For example, how familiar is the following scenario?

You pass out an assignment sheet and read over the directions with the class. You then instruct the students to work independently.

Student X approaches you a few minutes later and asks, "What are we supposed to do?"

"Did you read the directions?" you ask.

"Yes"

"Reread it to me."

Student X starts to read the directions aloud, "....ohhhhh. Ok. Thanks."

If students are not rereading the directions, do you think they are rereading the assigned text? To fix this, segment the text and provide Check for Understanding prompts. These can be questions that require the student to go back and identify evidence or details in the text, or cloze sentences that students have to complete with information from the text.

As teachers, we are probably most familiar with this strategy - we assign a text, then assess understanding with questions. However, be aware of students using the Internet to search for the answers. One way to avoid this is to ask students to write questions about the text that they can pose to each other. Using the Question-Answer-Relationship format (QAR), questions can be in the following formats, ranging from easiest to more difficult:

In the Book / Right There: The answer is easily found in the text. The exact words for the questions and answers are located in the same sentence.

In the Book / Think and Search: The answer is in the text but requires gathering information from different places in the selection.

In My Head / Author and You: The answer is not in the text. The reader combines previous knowledge with text information to create a response.

In My Head / On My Own: The answer is not in the text. The reader uses previous experience to answer the text.

Of course, there are hundreds of other ideas to evaluate understanding after reading, including Kahoot! type games, visualizing, discussion, cloze notes, etc. To ensure that students are getting the most out of the text, I strongly recommend that they annotate while reading, as they will find the assessment part after-reading much easier.

Paraphrasing is the ability to retell a story or text in one's own words. Many of our students resort to using paraphrasing tools such as Quillbot, however I strongly discourage this practice as the students are showing evidence of using technology instead of evidence of understanding the text. Click here for an example of a text that is "paraphrased" using one of these programs. As you can see from this example, the paraphrased text is awkward and does not read fluently. Unfortunately, the students who are using these tools do not edit the paraphrased version, and are still unable to actually restate in their own words the main idea of the text.

One suggestion for teaching paraphrasing is to segment the text, and require students to rewrite (in their own words) what they recall after each section. As an added benefit, students will be forced to reread the text as they clarify their understanding. Additionally, allow your struggling readers to collaborate in small groups through this activity as it will ease their stress while they learn from each other.

Summarizing requires that students to understand the overall idea of the text. A well-written summary should include who, what, when, where, why, and how and be written as one sentence (two for text longer than two pages).

One suggestion is to limit their summaries to 250 characters (think Twitter in the early days). Then ask students to remove 20 letters at a time until they have a solid sentence with no more than 100 words (the example above has 97 characters, including spaces). This is often more challenging for our advanced students, as they want to include all information. To make it engaging, challenge students to use the least amount of letters possible, while still writing a complete summary in sentence format.