The Institute of Educational Sciences Chris Weiland

Recommendation 1 Teach Students how to use reading comprehension strategies Strategy: intentional application of a cognitive routine by a reader before, during or after reading text Goal: to construct meaning from text Can be taught one by one or in combination 1. Activate prior knowledge/predicting 2. Questioning 3. Visualization 4. Monitoring, clarifying or fix up 5. Inference 6. Retelling Teach by using gradual release of responsibility towards independent use.

Recommendation 2 Teach students to recognize and use text structure Goal: to extract and construct meaning from increasingly complex texts Use of graphic organizers effective Narrative text: ~characters, setting, problem, and solution ~beginning, middle, end Informational text: (may contain multiple structures) ~Compare/Contrast ~Descriptive ~Sequence ~Problem/Solution ~Cause and effect

Recommendation 3 Guided high quality discussions of text Goal: To help students develop a deeper understanding of text 1. Structure discussion to compliment text, purpose, and level of students 2. Develop higher order thinking questions about text 3. Ask follow up questions that encourage students to apply comprehension strategies ~Should provide students with a model for thinking and encourage them to create and support opinions with textual evidence 4. Structured student led small group discussions

Recommendation 4 Carefully selected texts to support comprehension Goal: exposure to multiple genres of text Guidelines: 1. Use literary texts and informational texts 2. Rich content, strong organization, variation of word choice and sentence structure 3. Appropriate word recognition and comprehension difficulty for students and activity 4. Text supports purpose of instruction

Recommendation 5 Establish a engaging and motivating context to teach comprehension of text. Goal: to motivate students to become better readers 1. Help students discover the purpose and benefits of reading in daily life 2. Create opportunities for students to see themselves as successful readers 3. Give students reading choices 4. Give students time for peer collaboration