Module 2: Comprehension

       As an elementary teacher I have been really intrigued to see the prevalence of a gradual release model in many of the resources I have looked at for this class. I always felt as a student that there was very little modeling and guided practice in the secondary classroom, but the research seems to point to the power of these practices to increase student comprehension and vocabulary development in the content area class. Across the board I saw a theme emerge of the need for modeling and guided practice before students are able to complete a comprehension or vocabulary task independently. This was true in the Vanderbilt resource and the article I read.
   
    When looking at the Vanderbilt resource I learned the importance of selecting the right words to be taught and supporting students in the active processing of these words. According to Paul Beavers, it is critical that students are having input in what words are taught, based on the holes in their understanding, and their background knowledge is activated. Anita Archer, who was featured often in the resource, explicitly drew connections between vocabulary words and content area concepts so that students had a context for which to understand the new information. Students should also be taught how to use the text to derive meaning and begin to develop a self-awareness of when text does not make sense due to a lack of vocabulary. It is not an effective practice to give students a list of de-contextualized words and expect them to memorize their meaning.

         The online resource then moved on to talk about comprehension. They began by discussing activating prior knowledge, stating the merits of previewing reading material and using short video clips to expose students to requisite materials. From there the module moved on to monitoring comprehension, and teaching students how to do so. Students can monitor their comprehension by stopping to chunk and summarize as they read, generating the main idea of a section of text, and using "fix-up" strategies when they realize they are not comprehending effectively. Graphic organizers can be used as well and should be chosen based on the teacher's goals and the text type of structure. Even in fourth grade students learned that compare and contrast texts warrant a Venn Diagram, while time lines are more useful for taking notes about chronological texts. Finally, having students generate questions as viable and beneficial strategies to increase comprehension.

       I am going to focus on the final strategy that was introduced in the Vanderbilt resource: answering questions using a QAR strategy because that was the topic of the article I read. In Using Collaboration, Co-Teaching, and Question Answer Relationships to Enhance Content Area Literacy, Fenty et. al. (2012) share a strategy known to help students with knowing how to answer questions properly and how and when to use the text for support. The article specifically talks about how the strategy can support readers with a LD classification receiving the majority of their instruction in a mainstream setting, but it was also used with the non-classified students in the classes.

     Mrs. Hunt, a special education teacher profiled in the article, stresses the importance of collaboration with the general education teacher in introducing and supporting use of the QAR strategy. The teachers need to see themselves as equal players in the planning and instructional duties, each bringing an expertise to the table. Typically the special education teacher is more adept in strategy usage and the classroom teacher in content knowledge. With a solid team the strategy can be extremely effective (p.32). According to the article, "Researchers who have examined the use of QAR have found student improvements in deciphering types of comprehension questions, answering comprehension questions, and overall comprehension ability" (p.30).

       

      As shown above, the types of comprehension questions the authors refer to are first split into to big categories "In the Book" and "In Your Head." For the "In the Book" questions the text is used explicitly, while "In Your Head" questions may rely entirely on the reader's own experiences, as is the case for "On Your Own" questions. From there each category is divided even further with the text based questions either having the answers all in one place (Right There) or scattered across the text (Think & Search). Besides "On Your Own Questions," the reader might have to make an inference using their own knowledge and clues from the text (Author & You). Knowing the type of question will help support the reader in answering the question correctly, which was a commonly observed problem for struggling readers in the content area question.

     Mrs. Hunt used the QAR across content area classrooms and had lessons beginning with the most teacher support and eventually allowing students to identify the type of question and answer the questions independently. Throughout students were expected to articulate their thinking, both about the answer to the question and rationale for categorizing a question in a certain way. Even when students were eventually ready to complete a QAR task independently after seeing the skill modeled and engaging in guided practice, they still met with a partner or small group after to share their work and explain their process (p.36). QAR can be used by teachers of all content areas, and for the sake of the students comprehension skill development and ability to learn from nonfiction texts, it is important that they do so.