How can we help kids like Tanya with reading comprehension?
Here's how a graduate student and former teacher helps her students understand what they read and answer comprehension questions
Today, I was talking to a graduate student and former teacher about problems like Tanya's. I asked her how she would help such a child.
She told me she taught her 4th grade students to:
circle the words who/what/when/why/where/how when they appeared,
underline key vocabulary words in the question,
make a note when multiple items need to be mentioned (for example, the three in "give three examples of traits produced by natural selection").
That last item reminds me that I used to circle or underline the word "not" when it appeared, so I wouldn’t answer the question backward.
I wish I’d known her other tips when I was a student.
Here’s how her approach helps students like Tanya:
It directs their attention to key words and phrases.
It tells them what sort of words are important for comprehension: the "w" questions, certain sorts of vocabulary words, and the number of examples to give. Learning to look for these words, they develop the thinking habits needed for reading comprehension. (Eventually, when they get used to thinking this way, they won’t need to underline or circle things any more).
It helps them understand and answer the exact question being asked. Often, students answer a tangentially related query.
It slows them down, which reduces the number of mindless mistakes, such as misspellings.
It prevents them from misreading words (such as reading "fovea" instead of "retina").
Did your teachers do anything like this? Did it help?
If you teach children how to understand what they read, have you tried teaching techniques like this? How have they worked?
What else do you do to help students understand test and homework questions?