Education course work reading comprehension

1. Prediction

What do you know now?

Story

What do you expect next?

After reading or listening to a story, a student gets to know something in it. He or she can then combine what he or she already know outside the story, with the clues in the story and will be able to say what will happen next (Duke & Pearson 2001). This is called prediction.

Rational: Prediction makes the students to become better readers and writers (McNamara, 2007).

Prediction will support the assessment through getting the responses from students on where the predictions can be made in a story (Hibbard and Wagner 2003).

2. Clarifying

Clarification involves figuring out the meanings of the words that are hard to understand include looking for the little words in big words, the word parts (prefixes, suffixes and bases), keeping reading to get the general idea (Duke & Pearson 2001). For unfamiliar words, the writers follow these words with their definition between the comas.
Rationale: When students emphasize on clarification, they would be in the position of clearly getting the writer’s information which may be otherwise confusing to comprehend (McNamara, 2007).
Clarification will assist in assessment by getting the responses from the students on what they do when they get a word that they do not know while reading a story or what they do when they do not understand the text in the story (Hibbard and Wagner 2003).

3. Questioning

Story

Asking questions is an important strategy after prediction and clarification (Harvey and Goudvis 2007). The questions that are important to be asked include: why? How? When? Where? and what? These questions are based on the information obtained from the text.
Rationale: Questions are important in understanding what one has read and also identifying the important part to remember in the story (McNamara, 2007).
Questioning will assist in assessment by getting the responses from the students on the questions they would think from the story in order to test their understanding of the passage (Hibbard and Wagner 2003).

4. Summarizing

Summarizing is about using one or two sentences to tell the important ideas from a story. It could also imply the use of a single word to describe a list. In the above graphic organizer, a list consisting of the rabbit, horse and cat is summarized in one word as animals.
Rationale: Summarizing help the student to obtain and keep only the important ideas from the story in his or her mind (McNamara, 2007).
The assessment of students using the strategy of summarizing involves getting their responses on whether they can pick only the important parts from a story and avoid the details (Hibbard and Wagner 2003).

5. Visualizing

Visualization involves using something we are familiar with to create a mental picture of what we have read (Harvey and Goudvis 2007). In the above graphic organizer, the sentence saying “ The class roared” is obtained from the story. With the word roar, the student can think of the animal that roars and then picture out how the animal roars so that he can link the roaring of the class with that of the animal. This way, a mental picture would have been made in his or her mind.
Rationale: By creating a mental picture, it becomes hard for the student to forget what he or she has read in the story (McNamara, 2007).
Visualizing will assist in assessment of students by getting their responses on whether they can draw a picture or a diagram defining the ideas in the story (Hibbard and Wagner 2003).

References:

Duke, N. K., & Pearson, P. D. (2001). Effective practices for developing reading comprehension.
To appear in A. E. Farstrup & S. J. Samuels (Eds.), What Research Has to Say about
Reading Instruction. Newark, DE: IRA.
Harvey S. and Goudvis A. (2007). Strategies that work: teaching comprehension for
understanding and engagement. Stenhouse Publishers.
Hibbard K. M. and Wagner E. A. (2003). Assessing and teaching reading comprehension and
writing, 3-5. Eye on Education.
McNamara D. S. (2007). Reading comprehension strategies: theories, interventions, and
technologies Routledge.