Highlight Important Information

Highlighting important information tells the brain that it’s unique and significant, so it ‘stands out’ in our working memory. Use highlight tape to have students highlight information when they don’t own the book.

Record Summarizations

Have kids record, with or without a partner, summaries of their reading. When they get to the end of a page, have them stop and summarize what they just read. Now they’ve read the material and have had to think about it again right away. This repetition keeps what they just read in working memory longer and increases the likelihood they will remember it.

Ask Questions

Another effective strategy is to ask questions at the end of a reading. Have a template with questions like: Has anything like this ever happened to me? Did I ever feel this way? Does this happen in my neighborhood? At the end of each reading, have students answer a question in their journal or notebook, or answer a question to a partner. This strategy can also be used for homework by sending a list of questions home with a reading assignment.

Use Storyboards

To make a storyboard, have students fold a piece of paper into squares and draw about what they read. They might do this while they read a story for the first time, as a review with a partner, or for homework after a reading assignment. The process of turning verbal information into a visual format reinforces the learning and helps keep the information in working memory longer.

Teach Each Other

Research shows that teaching each other, or peer teaching, is one of the most powerful ways to learn. After teaching for seven to ten minutes, give students one to three minutes to share with each other. Talking it out with a partner lets students correct misconceptions and reinforces the material by keeping it in working memory long enough to make an impact.

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Fairy tales, cultural fables, and legends are good choices to practice this technique because of their familiarity to students. Most youth can relate to these stories and connect the issues, conflicts, and personalities presented in them to their personal lives. These connections support reading comprehension and enhance long-term recall.

In addition, the brevity of this genre allows for repetition and frequency, which is ideal for initial instruction as well as an intervention. Time constraints pose significant challenges to the secondary teacher, especially at the high school level. Utilizing short texts supports the learning objective without requiring significant class time.

Research Background

Reading comprehension is a complex intellectual process that involves two main abilities: understanding word meanings and reasoning with verbal concepts.  Without these abilities, students cannot comprehend and in turn do not internalize what they read. Comprehension happens within a reader’s mind, which means it cannot be measured in a tangible fashion. Comprehension can only be measured by inferring from a reader’s overt behavior. The use of strategies helps teachers infer a student’s comprehension of material read. Summarizing, recall, and inferential reading are all methods of instruction to determine a student’s comprehension of text.

When assessing comprehension within expository text, students must discern main ideas and concepts from text, contrary to literature where students must identify key elements to summarize a story completely. Summarizing materials allows students to connect to material in a personal manner as they have the opportunity to make a connection from personal experiences to the text. A summary allows students to synthesize, analyze, and evaluate material, which develops higher order thinking skills. However, most students lack the ability to write a summary in a concise manner. When summarizing, students need to identify what happened in the story and state the main details of the expository of literary text. Most students tend to rewrite the story and tell their teacher everything that happened to demonstrate that they read the passage. This is not a summary. A summary will summarize what the story was about in a concise and explicit manner. Using graphic organizers and the Somebody-Wanted-But-So (SWBS) strategy encourages students to develop concise summaries of literature.

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