Show Students Thinking Strategies That Good Readers Use

Once students learn to pronounce words, reading is easy. They can say the words they see. But if they understand them, it's a completely different question. Reading comprehension is complicated. However, teachers can help students learn concrete skills to become better readers. One way is by teaching them how to think while reading.

Marianne Stewart teaches eighth-grade English at Lexington Junior High near Anaheim, California. He recently asked his students to meet in groups to discuss books where the characters face difficulties. Students can choose from 11 different books, but in each group a student assumed the role of "discussion director", whose task was to create questions for the group to discuss together. Stewart created guidelines to help them formulate questions that require deep reading.

"When you find a strategy like this that really helps students wherever they are, it's like gold."

Marianne Stewart, English teacher at Lexington Junior High

This questioning process during reading is one of a series of "cognitive strategies" that Stewart teaches his students. The strategies focus on what research has proven to be the thinking process of good readers. Others include planning and setting objectives, taking advantage of prior knowledge, making connections, visualizing and forming interpretations. By mastering these strategies explicitly, students learn that reading is an active process, not one in which they simply say words in their heads.

And it is incredibly effective to improve your reading comprehension.

Carol Booth Olson, a professor at the School of Education at the University of California-Irvine, developed a program called the Pathway to Academic Success Project that teaches cognitive strategies to improve student achievement in both reading and writing. Olson's program trains teachers like Stewart to present them methodically and integrate them into the lessons during the school year. First in Santa Ana and then in Anaheim, the Pathway Project posted impressive results, closing achievement gaps for students who speak languages other than English and Latinos, who have traditionally had lower educational outcomes.

Now, with the support of the US Department of Education. UU., Olson's Pathway to Academic Success will expand beyond California to six other states.

Olson has long focused on bringing his program to urban schools, particularly those with large populations of students for whom English is not their first language. An eight-year study of English learners in the Santa Ana Unified School District found that students who receive instruction in cognitive strategies improved their writing at a higher rate than their peers for seven consecutive years. A follow-up study in Anaheim found that Latino students in the group who received instruction in cognitive strategies outperformed their white peers who did not receive instruction. And 10th grade English students who benefit from the program exceeded the state average on the high school exit exam by 20 percentage points, according to Olson.

By: Preeti Narula

Content: https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/53452/to-boost-reading-comprehension-show-students-thinking-strategies-good-readers-use