I found it surprisingly difficult to relate these readings about comprehension to my own comprehension processes. I have studied the topic of comprehension extensively in many of my classes here at MSU, but have never really reflected upon my own strengths and weaknesses with regards to comprehension. Using the chart on page 262 of the Tompkins book, I would say that the comprehension strategies that I use the most are connecting, evaluating, and monitoring. While I am reading, both for pleasure and for school, I like to think about the other things I know about the topic. Mostly, I make text-to-self connections, but this strategy really helps keep the material meaningful to me as I progress. I also enjoy evaluating the content of the text that I am reading. I really love being able to recommend books to other people, and being able to recognize what the author did well and what was not adequately illustrated throughout the book comes down to being able to critically evaluate the content while reading. I am also really skilled at monitoring how I am comprehending while I read. I am able to catch myself daydreaming or skimming after only about a paragraph of non-comprehension, which is crucial if I want to quickly complete books and articles. The two comprehension strategies that I struggle with the most are drawing inferences and predicting. I think I do poorly drawing inferences because I was always taught in elementary school that there was a "right" answer and a "wrong" answer. As I got older, adjusting to inference and interpretation was difficult for me. Also, I am very bad at predicting. Once I allow myself to sink into a good book, I rarely take the time to evaluate what I think will happen next throughout the story. Although I know that this is a very valuable skill to have, sometimes I simply cannot force myself to slow down enough to evaluate my thoughts about what I think will happen next.
In my placement, I spend most of my time working with the students who are at a lower reading level than most of their peers. They often struggle to answer the comprehension questions at the end of the text, and when I ask them questions about what they have just read, they cannot go into details about why they answer the way that they do. According to the article by Applegate, the students that I work with are minimalists. I believe that some of them are afraid of failure, so they fail to elaborate. However, many times I think that the students simply cannot remember what they have read adequately enough to respond to the most basic questions. What worries me the most about these students is that they do not have the strategies they need to become successful as readers in the future. Instead of looking back to the text to find the answers to the questions, they either look to me for what I think is the answer or simply guess. I believe that if they were taught some of the skills that are also discussed in the Applegate article, they could make gigantic progress and eventually match their peers' levels of understanding. One of the reasons that I think that these students are struggling with comprehension questions so much is that they are not yet fluent in their reading. The Tompkins book discusses this as a reason why students cannot comprehend; instead of focusing on understanding the story, these students are using all of their energy to decode the unknown words in the text. Related to this is the fact that most students who are not fluent do not have advanced vocabularies, so when they are finished reading the text, they may not understand some of the words that they have just finished reading. It is our job as teachers to teach students the comprehension strategies that they should use to become skilled readers. I cannot wait to relay some of the things that I read about for class this week to my future students!
I also have quite a bit of trouble of assessing my own reading comprehension. As an only child, I was an avid reader and would often fly through simple chapter books. Like you said, it's easy to get wrapped up in a book and not think too much about the way that you're doing the reading. I'm not sure I match any of the common types described in Applegate, but from my experiences in TE 301 and this course, I have seen readers that meet many of these descriptions. In particular, the literalists seem to be quite a common phenomena - there is a girl in my placement who the teacher views as very smart and a great reader, but she often flounders when asked critical thinking problems.
ReplyDeleteI think it's great that you are able to monitor yourself so well. I think of myself as a pretty solid reader, but monitoring is the one thing that I sometimes struggle with. I will often get all the way through a page of a research article and realize I have been thinking about something else completely while my eyes just scanned the words. This happens most often when I'm tired or distracted, but I'll then have to significantly backtrack to find the last place I remember.
Most of all, I think it's important that we find children books that are appropriate for their reading level and provide resources for them in which to discover these books. We talked about this quite a bit in TE 301 and Tompkins touched on it as well, but I think it's pretty important. As a child, I often suffered from this in two extremes. I've mentioned it before, but my school was obsessed with Accelerated Reader and I could pretty much have been the poster child. However, I would often read books significantly easier than my current level to get easy points and would conversely try to tackle books far beyond my understanding as well because of their point values. I specifically remember that "The Yearling" was the book in our elementary school library that was worth the most points. I tried to read it in first grade and between the higher-level issues and the dialogue written in dialect, I had to admit defeat. I felt like I had failed, although there was no way that book was appropriate for my reading level at the time. I was too busy trying to dissect the dialect to understand what was going on.
Overall, I think it's important to foster children's interest in reading while also helping them to understand. The strategies for helping different types of readers were well-conceived and I know that at least one of them would have been of extreme interest for me as a child - Story Impressions. If there's any one of those types I matched as a kid, it would be the author.
I think I am pretty much the complete opposite of Katie. The two comprehension strategies that I use the most while reading are making predictions and inferences. I always find myself asking questions while reading and wanting to know what happens next. I try to use the information in the text to make predictions about what happens next. I feel this makes the book a little more exciting and meaningful to me, especially when the predictions I make come true. I am not that skilled however with making connections and evaluating text. If the characters in the story are nothing like me, I find it difficult to make connections to my own personal life. Also, I rarely think about other text when reading which makes it difficult to make text to text connections as well. Unless the connection is explicitly presented in the text the likelihood of me making that connection is low. On the other hand, I am also a good monitor of my reading. I tend to drift off sometimes while reading but I am able to catch myself when I realize that I cannot remember what I read. When this happens, I go back to the last thing I remember in the text and begin reading again. Comprehension is the key to reading more than anything else. Students can be fluent readers but if they do not know what they are reading, it serves no purpose.
ReplyDeleteIn my placement, I've noticed students think like many of the profiles listed in the Applegate, et.al. article. The one I noticed most recently was the "Quiz Contestants." During reading group one day, I had a group of students reading a book about the sun. When they finished reading the book I asked them to recall the main ideas of the story and what they learned. One student stated that the sun warms the people on the planet and without it it would be too cold and we all would die. While that is all true, it was not stated in the text. This student was using her prior knowledge and connecting it to the topic of the story. I asked her if what she said was mentioned in the text and she was able to tell me that it was not. Like the article suggests, I think using concept maps would be one good strategy for helping a student who thinks like this.
A common strategy that I have seen in elementary classrooms, not only my current placement but past placements as well, is the "I wonder" strategy or questioning. Teachers encourage students to asks questions about the text that they think may be answered while reading. Asking questions is a good strategy to use because it gets the students thinking about the texts which makes them become more involved in their learning. If a student asks a question about a text, they are more likely to listen to the story to see if their question gets answered. Asking questions also fosters critical thinking; it allows students to go beyond what the text says to make greater connections. Knowing the types of readers your students are is extremely important in helping them become better learners.
These are some great reflections on your own comprehension! We're all so proficient readers at this point in our lives that it's easy to forget how we learned how to comprehend and how we still do every day. Kait-- your AR story is interesting to think about how motivation affects comprehension. Maybe if you had wanted to read The Yearling for reasons other than AR (interest, the author, etc) then you would have stuck with it, even though it is well above your reading level. I used to see this when my cousins were little wanting to read Harry Potter bc it was popular. Goblet of Fire is written at a 9th grade level, and 700+ pages but they still wanted to try!
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