READING & COMPREHENDING SOCIAL STUDIES MATERIAL TE 407 – HELMSING – 11/28/2011

COMPREHENSION Ideas about reading have changed throughout the history of education. Today, the dominant belief is readers are not passive receivers of information from printed materials Readers interact with text and construct meaning from it. (This is unlike how many college students engage with voluminous reading for class.) Comprehension is a cognitive process: Recognizing words and relating them to previously learned information Making inferences and judgments through connections

THE CHALLENGE OF SOCIAL STUDIES Students’ comprehension may be the most significant challenge novice teachers face in their teaching Social studies often deals with places and cultural practices that students may have never encountered Several abstract concepts (e.g. democracy, détente, alienation) Many specialized concepts and complex visual data (e.g. filibuster, political cartoons, primary sources, GNP tables) Three aspects of reading comprehension in social studies are essential to understand: 1.Building on prior knowledge 2.Metacognition about the text 3.Reading strategies for engaging the text

PRIOR KNOWLEDGE A combination of the learner’s preexisting attitudes, experiences, and knowledge It is a critical variable in reading comprehension: it may be seen as incomplete, but it’s mostly because students fail to relate their prior knowledge to information in the text Culturally relevant or culturally responsive pedagogies often take into consideration students’ “funds of knowledge” and lived experiences Help students link content to their lives

METACOGNITION Helps students think about the text and how the text is presented/structured Teachers and students should be able to identify these text characteristics 1.Text organization (statements of purpose and rationale, orgnaization of material, timelines, charts) 2.Explication of ideas (definitions, facts, ideas, statements) 3.Conceptual density (number of new concepts, ideas, and vocabulary introduced in a text; the higher the number the more complex the text) 4.Metadiscourse (“breaking the wall” – when an author points something out) 5.Instructional devices (tabels of contents, headings, annotations, indices, question boxes, activities)

STRATEGIES FOR COMPREHENSION 1.Determine importance – looking for main ideas 2.Summarize information – synthesize a passage 3.Draw inferences – draw conclusions 4.Generate questions – what are students thinking? 5.Monitor comprehension – checking for understanding and confusion

ACRONYMS FOR SOME STRATEGIES K-W-L Plus—Know-Want to Know-Learned PLAN—Predict/Locate/Add-Note RAFT—Role/Audience/Format/Topic REAP—Read/Encode/Annotate/Ponder REST – Record/Edit/Synthesize/Think SQ3R—Survey/Question/Read/Recite/Review TPRC—Think/Predict/Read/Connect