The school I went to for 1-8 grade had an incredibly rigorous curriculum. Students were expected to read and write before entering the first grade. I could not. I was struggling to keep up with my reading group that was the lowest group and only had four out of 36 kids in it. I was trying so hard just to get the words that the meaning was almost an impossible goal to reach. Since I couldn’t construct a meaning, all of the comprehension questions were lost on me. I was hard enough for me to get meaning from a sentence, let alone an entire story. We were also tested in every grade with the Iowa Basics Tests. This is a little unusual because normally they don’t test you every year, but my school made an exception. I had a really hard time with these tests and usually fell below the normal curve, well below the averages of my class. I feel that the ability to read the passages and questions was a large part of this. Once my reading skills improved and I was better with comprehension, my other scores in math and science went up as well. I believe Gibbons is right in his emphasis on comprehension. It is a very complex thinking process that students need to master to be literate.
Now my comprehension skills are pretty good when i am reading passages or stories. I still have trouble picking out the main idea when it comes to textbooks with lots of information in small amounts of space. To me, it all seems very important, especially if it is new. So, when I am in my first bio class, I will take hours to read one chapter because I am really trying to remember everything because I really don’t understand what will be important later in the field. I usually refer to this as the pitfall of novice understanding where surface knowledge of a subject is being attained along with a deeper meaning. I feel that sometimes professors, being experts, forget that when you are new to a field, it is hard to sort out what is important. But, I digress because my thoughts on this subject could go on for a long time.In my classroom at Marble elementary school, I think that my students are being set up for good comprehension. There are literature circle roles where there is a passage picher, word wizard, summarizer, illustrator, connector, and discussion director. Each literature circle has one of each and the students rotate roles on a weekly basis. For all of their readings, each student does something dependent on their role. Word Wizards make notes of unknown words and look them up, making lists for their group. Each role teaches the student a different part of comprehension. I think that this is a very good idea because students take it seriously because their whole group depends on them. I would like to use a similar idea in my own classroom because it doesn’t bog the student down with all the responsibilities of comprehension, and it also allows them to work with the individual aspects and master them separately so that they can do them all for themselves later on.
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Caitlin,
I think you make some very good points in your post. I too had similar experiences in my elementary years. I had a very difficult time with comprehension in elementary school because I was so focused on trying to say the right words that I wasn’t even thinking of the meaning of the text. As a result, I scored poorly on the reading section of standardized tests that we had to take. Since you mention that you were too a struggling reader in elementary school, I was just wondering if your teachers provided you with any extra guidance? I think that part of my problem comprehending also was that my teachers did not know how to teach effective comprehension strategies to me. I like how you stated that as your reading skills and comprehension improved your scores in math and science improved as well. That was true with me too because in order to answer many math or science questions, you have to be able to read and comprehend things such as charts and graphs. So, since you had such a difficult time with reading and comprehension in grade school, how are you as a teacher going to deal with struggling readers? What are some strategies or lessons that you could use with a struggling reader? Lastly, knowing how you felt being placed in the lowest group of readers, do you think that you as a teacher would divide groups up like that, having children with the lowest reading abilities in one group and the highest in another group or would you intermix? Why?
In my field placement, I also feel like my students are being taught good comprehension strategies. The teacher has the children do a lot of predicting, summarizing and even re reading of texts. I really like the literature circle activities that you explained. My CT teacher does not do that, but I think it would be a very effective activity to use to teach comprehension. Another strategy that my teacher uses a lot is echo reading. She will say a sentence in the story and then the children will repeat it. I believe that this is an effective strategy because poorer readers are not struggling to sound out the word; rather they are just repeating the word. This allows them to pay more attention on comprehending the story. Besides the literacy circles, what other strategies are you seeing in your field placement that teaches comprehension? I too believe that comprehension is a very complex thinking process that students need to master to be literate.
Carrie
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