Reading Comprehension
by Rebecca Sullivan
This week’s class meeting focused on research about reading
comprehension and different strategies we can used in fostering reading
comprehension in our students. Two of
the strategies we focused on and practiced in class were story boarding and
blocking.
Story Boarding:
One of the first teaching strategies we investigated was
story boarding. David L. Bruce argues
that story boarding is a useful tool to enhance reading comprehension and
student engagement in reading. Research has suggested that the more students
are able to manipulated one idea, the deeper their learning will become. A story board highlights this theory by
incorporating multiple learning modalities in its construction. As a class, we created a story board to
represent a clip from A Beautiful Mind. All participants were engaged in the story
board activity, and we discussed how it could be used to describe lab reports,
processes, and the main ideas in a unit (as a review before an assessment).
Blank Story Board Template:
Clip from A Beautiful Mind:
Blocking of Reading
Another comprehension strategy we implemented in class was
the blocking of reading assignments.
After each block of text, the students pause to reflect upon the reading
by jotting in key ideas and/or questions.
We enjoyed this strategy and liked that it forced us to pause and
reflect on the reading before moving on.
This also helps students to build the skill of metacognition in pausing
to think about what they understand from the text. At the end of several paragraphs, we discussed
with others in a small group. This could
be useful in class because stronger readers could model this skill to the
group.
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