Reading Comprehension Strategies

• Set a Purpose – Preparing students to read text improves student performance.  Students are not left guessing what you want them to know, understand, and be able to do when you explicitly determine and share the purpose of a reading.  Prereading activities are used to help familiarize students with ideas and content, set a purpose for reading, clarify how they read a text, help create mental outlines to effectively organize information, increase interest, and identify potential problems.



• Ask Questions – “Questions are the heart of teaching and learning. “ (Harvey, 2000.)  Questioning is a strategy that moves students forward .  When students do ask themselves questions as they read, they often abandon the text.  “Good readers” use questioning at all parts of the reading: before, during, & after.  Questions can range from those involving the content, issues, relationships, events, author’s purpose, and more.  Questioning makes students active participants in their reading!  Students need to be able to use a wide variety of question types and levels to gain deeper understanding of their reading.  Teachers need to teach students how to do this themselves to deepen comprehension through increased engagement with the text.



• Visualize – The sights, sounds, touches, and tastes! Those are the images which enrich meaning of text for “good readers.”  Visualizing allows students to create or paint a mental picture of the text.  Visualizing makes the reading real and more relevant.  From creating stick figure visuals to making video reenactments, visualization has many forms and looks.  Visualizes helps in the following ways:  enhances metal imagery, increases engagement with the text, creates connections or a “relationship” to the text, and helps students to stop and think about what the text is actually trying to convey.



• Determine Important Information – Determined often times by the purpose of our reading, determining the most important information in a text requires many skills: evaluating, synthesizing, making inferences and predictions, summarizing, comparing and contrasting, and before that can even be done, it requires understanding the text.  If students are unable to determining the most important information they will not know or be able to remember it.  They will have a more difficult time learning new information or connecting to prior knowledge.  Connections will be limited.  Students will not be able to identify the theme, perspective, text structure, or most certainly not the information most likely to be tested!  If our students cannot answer specific questions, chances are that they are unable to discern the relevant and important information from the irrelevant details.



• Make Inferences – The more we assist students in interacting with a text, the greater the likelihood of engagement and comprehension.  “Good readers” not only ask questions, but they make predictions, draw conclusions, make guesses, and most importantly make inferences.  These are important skills for all content areas and more importantly for life. By assisting students in understanding and using these skills, they will be better equipped in understand real world information and its relationship to others, underlying patterns and themes, and the making of educated decisions.  We should work with students to create visuals, to determine important information, to draw conclusions, make predictions, and defend with specific examples and text opinions and answers whenever they enter text.



• Make Connections – This strategy that “good readers” use is one that has most recently become a major focus (1980’s).  Our schema – sum total of all of our life experiences – is what we bring to our reading experience and text.  In order to engage readers, is to connect the text to that schema of prior knowledge or to create experiences for the reader to connect to prior their reading.  By accessing and providing students with connecting experiences, a launching point is created to increase understanding of a text and assist in building relevance to their lives.  This strategy can provide some of the richest experiences for the reader when he or she connects to the author, the ideas, the subject, etc.  Students look at patterns, details, examples, and make predictions, inferences, and conclusions by building on their schema by making connections.



• Monitor and Clarify – “Good readers” know what to do when they get stuck or fail to understand what they read.  Unfortunately, many of our students are faced with difficult text and have not developed the skills to check and correct when they get stuck.  Therefore, they lack understanding of the assignment.  The result is often abandonment of the text due to frustration.  Arming our students with ways to self-monitor their understanding and then do something about it is critical to developing “good readers.”  As part of this strategy, students learn to track their thinking, notice when they lose focus, stop and go back to clarify, reread, read ahead, identify confusing parts, think critically about the text, and match a reading strategy to a reading problem to solve any confusion in the reading.



• Summarize and Synthesize – An important life skill, summarizing is an active process that requires many different strategies (much like making inferences and determining the most important information).  “Good readers” are able to summarize and then put that information to use in a new way (synthesize).  Summarizing requires students to question, determine the most important information, evaluate information, and then put it all together.  This strategy can be practices through a wide range of activities and mediums: technology, writing, reading, and discussion opportunities.It is through these processes that students begin to understand how to make sense of what they read and gain greater and deeper understanding.
  
  Synthesizing is probably the most difficult and underused strategy, but one that “good readers” which goes beyond the reading a text.  By gaining information from a text or a variety of texts on the same subject, the reader evaluates, summarizes, and then puts that information to use in a new way or creates a new whole.  In such an information rich environment as we are today, it is imperative that our students are able to synthesize a large amount of information and make sense of it.  The next step is for them to DO something with that information.  The many research opportunities we present to students should be designed to synthesize information in a critical way rather than restating the same over used information it.  Strategies that lead to synthesis include stopping and thinking about text, determining the most important information, summarizing, combining details, generalizations, making judgments, creating new ideas, opinions, or perspectives, and making inferences.
  
  Reading must be an active process that students participate in to get the most out of it!  It is our role to help provide the experiences and tools to do so.