Strategies

for Improving & Remediating

Reading Comprehension Skills

By
Evelyn Egan, M.Ed.
Possible reasons for breakdowns in the comprehension process:

1. Poor decoding
- Students who spend too much time & mental energy figuring
out words.

2. Limited prior knowledge and vocabulary
- Knowledge base and knowledge of word meanings

3. Poorly developed strategies
- Word strategies: methods proficient readers deliberately employ
to facilitate their own comprehension
- Skills: enables a reader to employ strategies, but are used
automatically
Informal assessment recommendations:

1. Questions

2. Cloze Assessment

3. Oral Retellings

4. Others:
- Written responses to a selection
- Oral miscue analysis
- Sentence verification
- Student-generated questions
- Performance tasks based on the selection
- Evaluations of student participation in high-level discussions
or book clubs
Questions:

Types of Questions

1. Literal Questions
- Require a student to recall a specific fact that has been explicitly stated in the reading
Selection
- Easy & reflect superficial understanding
- Reading the lines

2. Inferential Questions
- Have factual answers
- The reader must make logical connections among facts in order to arrive at an answer.
- Reading between the lines

3. Critical Questions
- Students form value judgments about the selection.
- Reading beyond the lines
Questions Based on Reading Dependency

Reading dependency/passage dependency
-Is the need to have read a selection in order to answer a
particular comprehension
question

-If your intent is to assess reading comprehension, then your
comprehension questions should target information that lies within
the passage but that is not likely to lie within the students prior
knowledge.

Readability of Questions

The difficulty level of comprehension questions should certainly
be no higher than that of the selections on which they are based,
and ideally should be simpler.

The Kiss Method

Keep
It
Simple,
Sweetheart!
Cloze Assessment

-Involves deleting words from a prose selection & asking students
to replace them
on the basis of the remaining context.

-The ability to provide logical replacement words is thought to
indicate the extent to which a student is able to comprehend
the material.
Advantages of Cloze Assessment

1. It can be administered in a group setting, once students
have been introduced to its format.

2. It does not require comprehension questions.

3. They correlate highly with more conventional methods of
assessing comprehension such as asking questions.

4. Cloze & modifications of cloze have been successfully used
as a form of ESL & bilingual assessment.
Significant Limitations of Cloze Assessment

1. Its format can confuse students.

2. Spelling & fine-motor limitations can prevent students from
displaying what they actually comprehended.

3. Research indicates that cloze assessments tend to assess
comprehension at only a very low level.


Oral Retelling Advantages

1. Naturalistic
2. Avoids many pitfalls of questioning
3. Gauges how well a child has internalized the content of a selection


Note: Retellings demonstrate consequential validity. Studies have
demonstrated that just the practice of retelling narrative &
expository texts results in improvements in adherence to
story grammar, selection of high-level propositions, & cued recall.
Oral Retelling Limitations

1. They rely heavily on oral expressive ability.

2. One should always prompt students to retell the story.

3. One must always supplement a retelling task with questions
about the story to ensure comprehensive measure of the students
text comprehension.
Activities That Can Be Used to
Improve
Students Reading Comprehension
Explicit Instruction

1. Incorporates instruction in declarative knowledge, procedural
knowledge, & conditional knowledge.
2. Declarative knowledge involves teaching children what
the strategy is.
3. Instruction in how to use the strategy develops procedural
knowledge.
4. Instruction in when and why the strategy is most useful
constitutes conditional knowledge.
5. Effective strategy instruction utilizes gradual release
of responsibility instructional model.


Think-Alouds

The teacher models how to flexibly use cognitive strategies or
handle a comprehension problem.

Good readers apply strategies for fixing problems:
1. Reading ahead to see whether the problem can be resolved.
2. Rereading to see whether something has been misunderstood.
3. Reflecting on what has been read to see whether some
alternative explanation can be inferred.
4. Seeking information beyond the text in order to resolve the
Dilemma.
Student-Generated Questions

Self-questioning helps students appraise their understanding of the
Important ideas in a text.

Students may find that self-questioning helps them clarify & resolve
Challenging text.

Effective heuristics:
1. Signal words who, where, when, why, and how
2. How is related to
3. How are and alike?
4. What is the main idea of ?
5. Why is it important that ?
6. Use a story grammar model


Reciprocal Questioning (ReQuest)

It involves students actively in asking questions of the teacher
or one another during a discussion.

The basic idea is that in order to ask good questions, a reader must
understand that content reasonable well.

Variations:
1.The teacher introduces the reading selection & asks the students
to begin reading. At a predetermined point, the students stop
reading & one student is called on to ask questions of the teacher.
The teacher answers questions. When the student can think of no
more questions, the teacher asks the student additional questions.
Another student is called on for the next segment of the reading
selection.
Variations

2. An alternative technique is for the teacher to call on a student at
random after the selection has been completed. The student asks the
teacher one question & the teacher asks the student a question. The
teacher then calls on another student, and so forth.

3. The teacher begins the postreading discussion by calling on a
student. The student asks a question, but instead of answering it, the
teacher reflects it to another student, who must try to answer. This
second student may then ask a question, which the teacher reflects
to a third student, and so forth. The teacher may use his or her
knowledge of students abilities to decide which questions to reflect
to which students.
Summary Writing

Why it is effective

1. It compels students to transform content into their own words
& expressions; doing so requires active thought.
2. Students must make repeated judgments about the relative
importance of ideas.
3. Instruction in summarization teaches students to select important
Ideas, eliminate redundancies, & integrate the ideas in a
Synthesized & organized manner.

3 Approaches to Summary Writing:

I. Five-step method if assisting middle schoolers

a. Read only the subheadings of a chapter.
b. List the subheadings on paper.
c. Read the material.
d. Convert each subheading into a main-idea sentence.
e. For each main-idea sentence, add one to three sentences containing
supporting details.
II. GRASP (Guided Reading and Summarizing Procedure)

a. After the students have read a section of a text, ask them to turn
their books face down. Ask them to recall whatever they can from
the material. Record their input in a list on the board or on a
transparency.
b. Allow the students to return to the text & to locate more
information & to make corrections.
c. With student participation, rearrange the information into categories.
d. Help the students write a topic sentence for each category & detail
sentences that support it.
e. Engage the students in revising the summary to make it more
coherent.
III. GIST (Generating Interactions between Schemata and Text)

a. Students begin creating summaries for sentences using 15 spaces.
b. The teacher gradually increases the amount of text being
summarized in the 15 spaces.
c. GIST is conducted as a whole-class procedure first, then in
small groups, and finally, individually.
Reference

McKenna, M. C. & Stahl, K. A. (2009). Assessment for reading instruction. New
York, NY: The Guilford Press.