Improving Comprehension

Edgar Dale, author of Audio-Visual Methods in Teaching,  included the following insights into what helps strengthen comprehension:

We remember...

10% of what we read

20 % of what we hear

30% of what we see

50% of what we both see and hear

70% of what we talk about with others

Offering our students guided, structured and purpose driven collaboration opportunites, will help them better understand our reading assignments.

Why Am I Reading This?

 In Cris Tovani’s book, Do I Really Have to Teach Reading? she makes some excellent points about what we can do to help our students better understand our classroom reading assignments.  Too often students will not reread an assignment they don’t understand.  We asked them to read pages 34 – 39 and from their perspective, that’s what they did.  They read every word of the assignment.  Did they understand the words that developed phrases into sentences to form concrete ideas?  That wasn’t the assignment.  “Mr. Teacher, you asked me to read, not to understand.”

Perhaps it’s not that blatant, although I think it happens more times than we’d like to admit.  There are plenty of approaches we can use to help our students better understand the reading assignments we give and that’s were Tovani’s insights are helpful. 

The following excerpts are from chapter five, “Why Am I Reading This?”

“It’s funny that we don’t ask of ourselves what we ask of our students.  When we are planning a unit, preparing to teach a new class, or picking up a textbook for the very first time, we don’t expect to master everything in a semester.  Yet we expect our student to master the information in less time than we the experts did.

“If we don’t help students pull out essential information by giving them a purpose for their reading, they will often get lost in the extraneous details.  When we share a clear instructional purpose, we give our students a lens through which to read the piece. For example, a U.S. history teacher may say to his students, ‘By the time you finish reading tonight, I want you to be able to discuss the causes of the Civil War.”  The teacher is not telling students the causes; he is merely giving them a sense of what will be important for tomorrow’s discussion.

Clear instructional purposes often give guidance for how the reader might hold her thinking… A clear instructional purpose can greatly improve a reader’s comprehension, because the reader has an indication of what to read for.

Some teachers think that setting a purpose limits the scope of the students’ reading – that it dumbs down the work and makes it too easy on the kids.  I agree that I am limiting the scope of student reading, but I don’t agree that I am constraining their learning.  When I read new text with unfamiliar content, I need my scope limited.  If it’s not limited, I try to remember everything in the text.  I quickly realize that I can’t do this and soon give up.  When someone gives me something to look for , reading feels less overwhelming.

There are a lot of things that we as teachers can’t control.  But we can control what we ask our kids to do with the information we assign.”

Inspired by this chapter, The Reading Club recommends giving your students a purpose for every reading assignment. Tell them what to look for.  Tell them what kind of information you want them to hold on to by the reading’s close. 

If we assume our students will grasp the important information on their own, what happens when they don’t?  Avoid that confusion by clearly stating what you want your students to do with the information they discover when reading the assignment.  It doesn’t have to be a long, detailed discussion.  Use bullet points, Intelligent Writing Surfaces ©, LCD projectors, Moodle, yellow chalk on green boards.  

How you convey the purpose for the reading assignment matters little.  That you clearly and consistently convey the purpose for the reading assignment matters most.  

Readingly yours,

The Reading Club