Startling Fact

The reading level of documents, technicalmanuals, and other materials required by entrylevel positions in most fields far exceed thereading level of many students.

Meeting the Challenge of Adolescent Literacy, Judith Irvin, et al

Startling Fact

The American College of Testing found only 51%of U. S. college bound students having developed the ability to read the complex textscentral to college learning and the workplace.

ACT, 2006

2009 NAEP Proficient Reading LevelEighth-grade students performing at the ProficientLevel should be able to:• Provide relevant information • Summarize main ideas and themes• Make and support inferences about a text• Connect parts of a text• Analyze text features• Fully substantiate judgments about content and

presentation of content

How did this happen?Ineffective Reading Practices: • Skimming for answers• Surface processing• Reading and forgetting

Classroom Strategies for Interactive Learning, Doug Buehl

WHY ME?

1. Why should content teachers teach comprehension strategies?

2. What is included in effective comprehension instruction?

What does this mean for my content?

Common Core State Standards

Looks LikeLESS

• Teacher lecture• Always whole group• Assigned seat work with

little opportunity to practice new learning

MORE

• Think a-louds, modeling, process information actively

• Short whole group then small groups to process info

• Opportunities to practice, discuss similar work in pairs/small groups before assigning seat work

Comprehension Coding

! This is important√ I knew that.X This is different from what I thought.? I don’t understand.

Summarizing• Is not:– Retelling– Long– Full of a lot of

interesting details

• Is:– Process of identifying

salient information– Concise & specific– Reinforcing and

consolidating the many processes involved in learning from text

Comprehension Coding and

Summarization

Model Lesson

Prerequisite Skills

• Determine importance• Delete unimportant information• Condense information• Categorize terms into specific groups• Transform condensed information into writing

Animal Clones: Double Trouble?READ – Handout– While Reading: • Stop after each section• Highlight what you think is key to

understanding the text• Write a few words out to the side of most

important information concerning topic

After Reading:

• Share with neighbor – what you highlighted/annotated

• Add to key points or delete some after discussion

• Write in 15 – 25 words the key points in a paragraph or a $2.00 Summary

Argumentative Writing•Making claims and providing evidence is called argumentation.•In academic sense, argumentation refers to the reasoning that someone used to prove a point.

Scientific ArgumentsClaims - what I think is correct or

happenedEvidence – presented to support a claim,

from dataWarrants – explain why this evidence

provides legitimate supportBackings – evidence that a warrant is

valid (not always used)