Monitoring Reading Comprehension

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Monitoring Reading Comprehension
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Reading Comprehension

• Intentional thinking during which meaning is
  constructed through interactions between text and
  reader. Harris and Hodges, 1995, p. 207

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Instruction in Monitoring Comprehension

• Requires multiple approaches
• Multiple Strategies
• Metacognition
• higher order thinking which involves active
  control over the cognitive processes engaged in
  learning
• Students as active learners
• Systematic and Explicit Instruction

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Questions?

• What types of problems do your students have with
  reading comprehension?
• What do you think interferes with reading
  comprehension?
• What is the difference between reading
  comprehension and listening comprehension?

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Reading comprehensionOne Model
Fundamental Skills (phonological awareness,
Alphabetic Principal)
Word Reading
Reading Comprehension
Verbal Language Skills (Receptive Expressive)
Fluency
Listening Comprehension
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Comprehension Requires

• An awareness and understanding of one's own
  cognitive processes
• Recognition of when one doesn't understand
• Coordination and shifting the use of strategies
  as needed

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Comprehension as a Discrete Unit

• When teaching, and assessing reading
  comprehension to struggling readers
• Consider reading comprehension as a discrete unit
• Avoid teaching and assessing multiple essential
  components (e.g. fluency, decoding)
• Example
• Look at the script from Handout 1
• What is going on?
• What are some issues?

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Critical Issues in Reading Comprehension

• Answering explicit and implicit questions
• Strategy use
• Understanding main ideas
• Generating main ideas
• Summarizing
• Assessing student comprehension / student use of
  strategies

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Teach these Types of Questions

• Right there
• Explicit question answer in the text
• Think and search
• Explicit question need to piece together
  information from text
• Author and you
• Inferential use text and prior knowledge
• On your own
• Prior knowledge alone

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Activity

• Read the passage The Great Barrier Reef (Handout
  2)
• With a partner, develop one question of each type
• Briefly discuss strategies for teaching how to
  teach the different types of questions.

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4 Steps

• Teach the four types of questions in isolation
  and in this sequence
• Model how to analyze and answer questions
  (Think-Aloud)
• Students Practice
• Assess how students apply skills

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Model

• Model how to analyze and answer questions
• Refer Again to Handout 2
• Lets Try!!!

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Practice

• Give students opportunities to practice
• Encourage students to use the think-aloud
  strategies
• This allows you to monitor their understanding of
  the process
• This allows you to identify and remediate errors

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Assess

• Assess how well students apply skills
• Assessment should be ongoing through informal
  measures (Teacher checklist, anecdotal notes)
• Assessments should include some hard data
  collected at regular intervals
• Look at the questions in Handout 2

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Prepare Students

• Preview texts and teach students to identify
  critical components
• Make predictions (teach why we might do this)
• Use KWL charts / Graphic organizers / semantic
  maps to build understanding
• Explicitly teach students difference between
  expository and narrative texts

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Texts

• Expository
• See Handout 3
• Narrative
• See Handout 4

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Understanding During ReadingMonitoring
Comprehension

• Helping students to become strategic,
  metacognitive readers
• The goal of comprehension-monitoring instruction
  is to
• develop students awareness of their own
  understanding of what they read
• know if they are understanding what they read
• know what they can do to correct comprehension
  difficulties

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Multiple Strategies

• Graphic Organizers
• Take out Handout 5
• Take 5 minutes to look at the organizer. How
  could this be used with The Great Barrier Reef?
  (Handout 2)
• Story Maps
• KWL Charts
• Retell

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Multiple Strategies cont.

• Narrative Comprehension Cards
• Take out Handout 6 and Handout 7
• Review the Story (Handout 7)
• Expository Comprehension Cards
• Take out Handout 7 and Handout 2

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Main Idea

• Teach students strategies to identify key
  components of stories / expository text and
  monitor comprehension
• Teach students to condense stories and narrative
  text into succinct main idea statements
• Get the Gist
• Cooperative Learning
• Think-alouds
• Teach students to recognize the main idea when
  presented by peers, teacher, or in text-based
  questions

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Main Idea Strategy

• Get The Gist
• Take out Handout 8
• Lets try making a Gist Statement
• Who or what is the paragraph about?
• Tell the most important thing about the who or
  what
• Tell the main idea in 10 words or less

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Summaries

• Summaries are brief, concise statements of the
  main ideas and most important information
• First, identify the main ideas of individual
  paragraphs or sections of a text
• Then, link the main ideas together into a summary
  of what was read
• NOT RETELL!!

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Steps for Assessment

• Administer early reading inventories
• Provide opportunities for discussions that
  include open-ended, complex questions about texts
• Ask students to retell stories
• Record anecdotal data
• Use samples of student work
• Monitor Progress
• Summative Evaluations

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Approaches to Assessment

• Teacher Checklist
• Strategy assessment
• Are students using strategies appropriately?
• Teacher observation
• Informal paper assessments (See Handout 9)
• Formal Assessments

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Formal Assessments

• Standardized assessments
• State assessments
• Formal Progress Monitoring Tools

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Informal Assessments

• CBM
• Establish Baseline
• Set Goals
• Weekly Measures
• Classroom assessments

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Using Data Effectively

• Data collected should be used to drive
  instruction
• Gaps in student understanding should be retaught
  and reinforced
• Student skills should be reinforced and used to
  promote additional acquisition of skills and
  strategy use

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Matching Monitoring to Teaching

• Monitoring student progress is directly related
  to instructional practices
• Informal measures should be linked to effective
  practices
• Formal and informal measures should be combined
  to make summative evaluations

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OK135S067
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Steps for PM - Students

• Initial Assessments
• Establish Performance Goal
• Develop a Goal Line
• Monitor Progress
• Evaluate Performance
• Adjust Goal Line
• Modify or Replace Instruction
• Monitor Progress..

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Establish Goal and Trend line
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Monitor Student Performance
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Interpreting Data

• What do these data indicate about student
  performance?
• What do they indicate about the effectiveness of
  the instruction?
• What is the next step?

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Adjust Performance Goal Line and Goal
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Another Example of Student Performance
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Interpreting Data

• What do these data indicate about student
  performance?
• What do they indicate about the effectiveness of
  the instruction?
• What is the appropriate response?
• What may be required? How will you know?

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Adjusting to Performance
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Samples

• Take out Handout 10 Look at the samples of these
  three students.
• How would instruction differ across these
  students? Why?
• What would you target?
• What would be useful assessment measures for
  each?
• When might you consider changing practices?

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Remember

• Comprehension is the reason for reading. . . .
  Research from over 30 years has shown that
  instruction in comprehension can help students
  understand what they read, remember what they
  read, and communicate with others about what they
  read.
• National Institute for Literacy, 2001, p. 48

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Youll find a teacher to help You comprehend that
in any room ..and they never fail.