7 Comprehension Strategies Every Teacher Can Share
How can you help students improve their reading comprehension?
Researchers have extensively studied the skills strong readers have in common. In Best Practice, Fourth Edition, Steven Zemelman, Harvey “Smokey” Daniels, and Arthur Hyde summarize what published, peer-reviewed articles and books identify as the 7 reading skills and strategies most crucial for students to learn as they improve their comprehension. How many can you name?
1. Monitoring comprehension
Actively keeping track of one’s thinking and adjusting strategies to the text at hand
2. Visualizing
Making mental pictures or sensory images as one reads
3. Connecting
Linking what’s in the text to personal experience, world events, or other texts
4. Questioning
Actively wondering about the text, watching for uncertainties in it, and interrogating the text and the author
5. Inferring
Predicting, hypothesizing, interpreting, and drawing conclusions about the text
6. Determine importance
Making judgments and weighing the values of the text or the author
7. Synthesizing
Retelling and/or summarizing a text and remembering information from it
Read Steve, Smokey, and Art’s Best Practice, Fourth Edition for more.
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