Reading Comprehension Tools to Use Before, During and After Reading

An Anticipation Guide is a short list of statements based upon ideas found in the assigned text. These statements, requiring students to activate their background knowledge, should challenge or support students' beliefs about the content. Anticipation Guides also engage students in making predictions about the selection and comparing their beliefs to the author's.

Directed Reading Thinking Thinking Activity (DRTA), an instructional tool that works well with both content area and narrative text, is used before during and after reading. DRTA helps students focus on what they are reading and why. The teacher decides upon "stopping places" in the text where enough information supports additional predictions. These questions are consistently posed: What do you think the story or selection is about: Why do you think so? Can you prove it? and/or How do you know?

• Before reading, students examine the title, pictures, graphs, etc. and questions at the end of the selection. Accessing their background knowledge and experiences, students answer the above questions. The focus/purpose of the initial reading is set as determined by the best possible prediction students have made.
• During reading, students test their predictions and re-evaluates the purpose in light of added information. Repeating the suggested questions, the instructor asks, "How do you know?" to clarify and verify ideas. Students continue reading to next stop, adding additional reflective questions: "Were you right?" and "How do you know?" or "Can you prove it?" Based upon accumulated information, students form new hypotheses or predictions.
• After reading, teacher and students discuss whether or not their ideas were right in what they thought would happen. Analysis of whether or not students' predictions/ hypotheses were close to the author's purpose should also be part of this discussion.

GIST is a tool to help students drill down to the main idea or to develop conclusions from the text. This guides them in seeing the big idea through creating a summary. Alone or in partners, students consolidate their thoughts by writing one or two sentences about the passage, using 20 words or less. Prior to assigning the text, the teacher may want to pose a question to help students focus their reading. Next, students respond to the question and their reading by filling in no more than 20 blanks outlined on their paper.

If students struggle with this learning tool, teachers may want to present it in phases by starting with 50 words, for example. Students would then eliminate unnecessary words in an attempt to cut the sentences down to 40 words, then 30, and finally to the 20 words that puts the most important info into a nutshell.

Tailgate Party, also known as Tea Party, helps student draw inferences from quoted sentences in order to make predictions about a story/article/chapter they are about to read. Teachers copy exact words, phrases or sentences from text onto index cards. These "clues" should supply insights into the story or article and be open to a variety of interpretations. Students share their cards and discuss how the statements might relate to the text. Finally, students record their predictions by creating "We thibnk" statements - "We think that this selection is about . . . ". As students share these statements, they explain how they reached that prediction. Finally, students read the selection.