Florida ged plus college Preparation Program Curriculum and Resource Guide


Objective 4 – Appropriate Strategies to Increase Comprehension



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Objective 4 – Appropriate Strategies to Increase Comprehension


Select and apply appropriate strategies to increase comprehension, including but not limited to SQ3R Study Method, GIST, About Point, Cornell Notes, Mapping and Graphic Organizers, KWL, Venn Diagrams, Scaffolding, and Cloze

There are a wide range of strategies that students can use to improve their comprehension skills. The problem with most adult education students is that they just start reading. They don’t use strategies that could help them be more effective readers. The following is a list of strategies with explanations, activities, and as needed templates that can be used in the Florida GED PLUS classroom.


Strategy – SQ3R: The Steps to Comprehension

A well-known comprehension strategy is Survey Q3R, better known as the SQ3R. This technique can significantly help students to understand content material that they have read. The steps are:



Survey or Preview: Students survey an entire chapter or literary work to gain an overall impression of the content. Have students TIPP? the material.

Question: Students pose questions that they want to read and answer during this step. You may wish to have students turn each subheading into a question.

Read: Students need to read the entire section or chapter and try to answer the questions that they have posed. This step helps students to become actively involved in the reading process.

Recite: This step applies only to one section at a time. After students have read each section, have them recite the important information from that section in either an oral or written form.

Review: This step applies after students have completed the chapter or reading assignment. Students should review the important concepts, generalizations, and facts that they gained from the chapter.

The next page provides you with a handout for students to use when learning the Survey Q3R method. You may wish to use small group discussion when students are first being taught this strategy.


Strategy – The Survey Q3R: Reading for Comprehension


BEFORE READING

Survey – Look for illustrations, titles, subheadings

Question – Ask:


  • What do I know?

  • Why am I reading?

  • What do I need to find out?

DURING READING

Read


  • Check if reading makes sense

  • Understand words from how they are used in the sentence

  • Stop and ask questions while reading

AFTER READING

Recite – Try to answer out loud why and what was read

Review


  • Reread in order to verify answers

  • Make connections to what is already known

  • Make inferences and conclusions

Strategy – GIST: 5Ws and an H

The GIST (Generating Interactions between Schemata and Text) Procedure is a strategy that can be used to improve students’ abilities to comprehend the gist or main ideas of paragraphs by providing a prescription for answering the 5 Ws and H questions and then developing a summary of the passage. This strategy incorporates reading and writing. At a higher level of comprehension, students may even wish to try to get the “gist” of an entire chapter or unit in a summary sentence.



Getting the GIST– 5 Ws and H
Name of Text ___________________________________________________________________
Complete the following:
Who? ___________________________________________________________________

___________________________________________________________________
What? ___________________________________________________________________

___________________________________________________________________


When? ___________________________________________________________________

___________________________________________________________________


Where? ___________________________________________________________________

___________________________________________________________________
Why?_______________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________________
How? ___________________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________________

Write a GIST statement of 20 words or less that summarizes the text.
___________________________________________________________________

___________________________________________________________________

___________________________________________________________________

___________________________________________________________________

___________________________________________________________________

Strategy – About Point

About Point is a comprehension strategy where students identify the main idea and major points of a passage. Students should have experiences in finding and rewording the main idea and supporting ideas before using this type of form to improve comprehension skills. This is an important comprehension strategy to use when you need students to have the major point in a passage prior to continuing to read for clearer meaning.



About Point Activity Sheet

Read the material that your teacher has assigned. Then decide what the passage is About and what details or Points support your answer to complete the About Point Activity Sheet.

This reading is ABOUT ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
and the POINTS are ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Strategy – Mapping and Graphic Organizers

Graphic organizers are “mind tools” that may be used to plan activities and investigations or to review text within any content areas.

Some of the basic graphic organizers are:


  • Concept maps — show relationships between ideas or concepts. A concept map can be used to identify prior knowledge and understanding and to summarize concepts.

  • Mind maps — similar to concept maps, but show ideas branching off from each of the main ideas.

  • Venn diagrams — help make comparisons. The overlapping area “contains” similarities. Differences are identified in the areas that do not overlap.

  • Flow diagrams — sequence ideas, procedures, or events and are often called process diagrams.

  • Sequencing illustrations — cartoons and storyboarding that show pictorially the sequence of ideas, procedures, or events.

  • Consequence maps — show the consequences of a series of actions or events like a ripple effect from a central event. The consequence map is developed in stages from the central event.

  • Issues maps — show the different categories of issues which relate to a particular event or topic of concern. It is often helpful to have issues phrased as questions.

Following are templates of a few of the types of graphic organizers.

Problem-Solution Summary

Students document the problems that they locate in the text or that they are encountering in a project and identify solutions for the problems.




Problems

Solutions







Fishbone Map – Cause and Effect

A Fishbone Map is used to show the causal interaction of an event. The key questions for a teacher to ask a student who is completing the fishbone map are: What are the factors that cause X? How do they interrelate? Are the factors that cause X the same as those that cause X to persist?





Chain of Events

This graphic organizer is used to describe the steps or stages of an event or action. This is an excellent tool for students to use in literature, science, and social studies. Key questions to ask students include: What event occurred first? What happened next? How does one event lead to another? What was the final outcome?

Beginning




Compare/Contrast

This technique is helpful to show similarities and differences. Key questions should be: What are being compared? How are they similar? How are they different?






Name 1

Name 2

Attribute 1







Attribute 2







Attribute 3







Attribute 4







KWL

Another technique is KWL. The first column is completed prior to the lesson being taught. A student is asked to list what he/she knows about a topic. Next, the student writes in what he/she would like to know about the topic from the lesson, and finally, after the lesson is completed, the student writes down what he/she has learned.



KWL


Strategy Sheet

What We Know

What We Want to Find Out

What We have Learned










Venn Diagrams

A Venn diagram is a visual representation of the similarities and differences between concepts. Students record features or characteristics of the concepts in their respective ovals. A Venn diagram helps students think about how concepts are similar or different. Teachers should model the process for students, but it is very important that students complete their own Venn diagrams. Avoid thinking that there is a right Venn and a wrong one. Judge the students’ Venn diagrams on how well they selected key characteristics and whether they can justify the classification of similarities and differences.

Use Venn diagrams to have students compare regions of the state or country, economic features of the North and South before the Civil War, Presidents, capitalism versus communism, branches of government, political parties, and national versus state government. Expand the activity by having students write a paragraph summarizing their findings.

One example of a Venn diagram with summary paragraph was developed by ReadingQuest and is accessible on the World Wide Web at: http://www.readingquest.org.


Strategy – Scaffolding

Scaffolding is an instructional technique where the teacher models the desired learning strategy or task and then gradually shifts responsibility to the students. Scaffolds are especially suited to teaching higher-level cognitive strategies. The teacher provides support for the parts of the process that students are unable to complete on their own. This support decreases as the students' level of competence increases.

Two scaffolding strategies in teaching reading are: working with new knowledge and accepting partially correct responses. In the first strategy, a teacher explains some part of the text or contrasts a feature presented with something he/she knows the student understands from another reading. In the second strategy, the teacher uses what is correct in the student's response but probes or cues the student, so as to suggest good possibilities for active consideration.

Another scaffolding strategy is for the teacher to model the appropriate thinking or working skills in the classroom. Such modeling helps students understand the strategy and provides an actual example of the strategy in use.

One type of scaffolding strategy is the Scaffold Reading Experience (SRE). SRE is a set of pre-reading, reading, and post-reading activities designed to assist students in successfully reading, understanding, learning from, and enjoying a particular written text.

There are two phases of a SRE. The first is that the instructor considers the student, the selection that is being read, and the purpose of the reading. Based on these considerations, the instructor selects those pre-reading, reading, and post-reading activities that will lead to student success. SRE is a flexible technique based on teacher planning and student need.



Phase One: Planning



Phase Two: Implementation Strategies/Activities


Pre-Reading Activities

Pre-reading activities prepare students to read the upcoming selection. They can get students interested in reading the selection, remind students of things they already know that will help them understand and enjoy the selection, and pre-teach aspects of the selection that students may find difficult. Pre-reading options for an SRE include: motivating students, relating the reading to students' lives, activating background knowledge, building text-specific knowledge, pre-teaching vocabulary, pre-teaching concepts, pre-questioning, predicting, setting directions, and suggesting reading strategies.



During Reading Activities

Reading activities include both things that students themselves do as they are reading and things that teachers do to assist them as they are reading. Reading options for an SRE include: silent reading by students, oral reading by teachers, teacher-guided reading, oral reading by students, and teacher modification of the text.



Post-Reading Activities

Post-reading activities provide opportunities for students to synthesize and organize information gleaned from the text so that they can understand and recall important points. They also allow students to evaluate an author's message, his or her stance in presenting the message, and the quality of the text itself. Post-reading activities assist both teachers and students in the evaluation process.


Strategy – Cloze Procedure

A cloze activity assesses a student’s reading strategies and abilities to make sense of texts. A cloze procedure involves deleting words from a passage of text and replacing them with blank lines. The student must provide the author's original word (or a suitable synonym) for each space.

The cloze technique is used to:


  • Identify students' knowledge and understanding of the reading process

  • Determine which cueing systems readers effectively employ to construct meaning from print

  • Assess the extent of students' vocabularies and knowledge of a subject

  • Encourage students to monitor for meaning while reading

  • Encourage students to think critically about text and content

To prepare materials for cloze exercises, the teacher should:

  1. Select a self-contained passage of a length appropriate for the academic level of the students being assessed. Use materials easily read by the students.

  2. Leave the first and last sentences and all punctuation intact.

  3. Carefully select the words for omission using a word-count formula, such as every fifth word or other teacher-defined criteria. To assess students' knowledge of the topic or their abilities to use semantic cues, delete content words which carry meaning, such as nouns, main verbs, adjectives, and adverbs. To assess students' use of syntactic cues, delete some conjunctions, prepositions, and auxiliary words.

  4. When preparing the final draft of the passage, make all blanks of equal length to avoid including visual clues about the lengths of omitted words.

  5. Have the students read the entire passage before they fill in the blanks.

  6. Encourage the students to fill in each blank if possible.

  7. Suggest that students reread the completed passage.


Interactive Cloze
In an interactive cloze, the words deleted are words that can be worked out from studying the text and from thinking about how written language works. Students are encouraged to use context to work out which word will fill the gap.

When creating an interactive cloze activity:




  • make sure there are clues in the text for each missing word;

  • select a variety of words;

  • choose at least one word that is important for cohesion; and

  • try to select some words for which there are several alternatives as this will lead to discussion.

When using this type of cloze activity, students first work on their own to fill in the gaps, then discuss their answers in pairs or small groups. The teacher then leads a class discussion, looking at the alternatives and pointing out the clues in the text.

Poetry or music is an effective way to use an interactive cloze activity with higher-level readers. In a “closed” poem, certain words are deleted and replaced with blank lines. Brainstorming possible replacements for the blanks is the students' first task in an interactive cloze activity. As its name implies (interactive cloze), the brainstorming (and the tasks that follow) is done in small groups (or pairs, at a minimum). At this stage in the interactive cloze activity, students are encouraged to be "free ranging" in their thinking; they're asked to generate several alternative replacements for each blank without making value judgments about a single best replacement. In determining possible replacements, students will be paying attention to syntactic and semantic clues in the text and drawing on their prior knowledge.

After a period of brainstorming, students are asked to decide which of their possible replacements they prefer for each blank. Students then present their vision of the text to the class (possibly a "dramatic" presentation of their text) and explain the reasons for their choices. These explanations are essential because they show how and why words or phrases were selected.

After all student versions have been presented, the teacher presents the author's version of the poem and invites students to give their responses to the different versions (including which word choices they now prefer and why) and to speculate about the author's choices (why they think the author might have made his/her word choices). Exploration is the goal at this stage - not leading students toward a meaning, or an interpretation of what the text "is" about.

Disappearing Definition Cloze
This cloze strategy assists students in memorizing important information. A definition or process is written and read. Every seventh word is then erased. Students read the text again and include the missing words. The seventh word is again erased, and students read the definition in its entirety. The process continues until there is no text on the board. The students then write down the definition/text.

This is a memory activity and should be used with important pieces of information or definitions that are needed in a course.



Sample Cloze Activity Using Lyrics
Complete the following text with appropriate words that fit the context and tone of the song. Be prepared to support why you chose each word and how it fits into the poetic flow of the lyrics.
There's a lady who's sure

All that glitters is _____________________

And she's buying a ___________________

When she gets there she knows

If the stores are all ____________________

With a _________________she can get what she came for.

Ooh, ooh, and she's buying a _________________
There's a sign on the ___________________

But she wants to be sure

'Cause you know sometimes words have two ______________

In a tree by the _________________

There's a songbird who __________________

Sometimes all of our thoughts are ________________

Ooh, it makes me wonder,

Ooh, it makes me wonder.

There's a _________________ I get

When I look to the __________________

And my ________________ is crying for leaving.

In my thoughts I have seen

Rings of smoke through the ___________________

And the ________________ of those who standing looking.

Ooh, it makes me wonder,

Ooh, it really makes me wonder.

And it's whispered that soon

If we all call the _________________

Then the piper will lead us to reason.

And a new day will ___________________

For those who stand long

And the _________________ will echo with laughter.

If there's a bustle in your ________________

Don't be alarmed now,

It's just a ________________ clean for the May queen.

Yes, there are two paths you can go by

But in the long ______________________

There's still time to change the road you're on.

And it makes me wonder.

Your head is _________________ and it won't go

In case you don't know,

The ________________ calling you to join him,

Dear lady, can you hear the wind blow,

And did you know

Your stairway lies on the whispering ____________________

And as we wind on down the road

Our __________________ taller than our soul.

There walks a lady we all know

Who shines ________________ light and wants to show

How everything still turns to gold.

And if you listen very hard

The _____________________will come to you at last.

When all are one and one is all

To be a rock and not to roll.

And she's buying a ___________________

Lyrics to Original Song

Stairway to Heaven by Led Zeplin

There's a lady who's sure

All that glitters is gold

And she's buying a stairway to heaven.

When she gets there she knows

If the stores are all closed

With a word she can get what she came for.

Ooh, ooh, and she's buying a stairway to heaven.

There's a sign on the wall

But she wants to be sure

'Cause you know sometimes words have two meanings.

In a tree by the brook

There's a songbird who sings,

Sometimes all of our thoughts are misgiven.

Ooh, it makes me wonder,

Ooh, it makes me wonder.

There's a feeling I get

When I look to the west,

And my spirit is crying for leaving.

In my thoughts I have seen

Rings of smoke through the trees,

And the voices of those who standing looking.

Ooh, it makes me wonder,

Ooh, it really makes me wonder.

And it's whispered that soon

If we all call the tune

Then the piper will lead us to reason.

And a new day will dawn

For those who stand long

And the forests will echo with laughter.

If there's a bustle in your hedgerow

Don't be alarmed now,

It's just a spring clean for the May queen.

Yes, there are two paths you can go by

But in the long run

There's still time to change the road you're on.

And it makes me wonder.

Your head is humming and it won't go

In case you don't know,

The piper's calling you to join him,

Dear lady, can you hear the wind blow,

And did you know

Your stairway lies on the whispering wind.

And as we wind on down the road

Our shadows taller than our soul.

There walks a lady we all know

Who shines white light and wants to show

How everything still turns to gold.

And if you listen very hard

The tune will come to you at last.

When all are one and one is all

To be a rock and not to roll.

And she's buying a stairway to heaven.





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