Module Eleven: Guiding Students through Content Text Material

Objectives

During this module you will

Introduction

If you can answer yes to any of the following questions, then this module may be of great use to you:

  1. Have you found parts of your content text too difficult or confusing for your students?
  2. Do your students have difficulty determining what is and is not important in a class wide reading assignment?
  3. Have you found a useful supplemental source of print to augment an incomplete text topic?
  4. Do you find yourself writing additional text material or explaining (and re-explaining) difficult sections of text or narrative material?
  5. Have you ever wished you could be there in study hall or at the homework table to continue assisting your students?

Problems with Content Texts

Without criticizing the entire textbook industry, there are times when the classroom teacher needs to step in and augment, modify, or eliminate part or all of the text material.

Underdone, overdone, and out-of-date text information can all be good reasons to intervene. In addition, factors such as varying student ability frequently call for you to customize text concepts for both struggling and excelling students.

Textbooks are the source of much text information across the various content areas, and rightly so. Rich, essential content cannot always be repackaged into easier vocabulary or shortened text entries for struggling students. Study guides help us keep the integrity of the content while manipulating the order and structure of the text.

Adjusting Texts to Readers, and Adjusting Readers to Texts
(with study guides)

Certain adjustments can be made without diminishing the text or denigrating student learning or esteem. Selective, non-continuous text reading can be arranged by a knowledgeable content teacher. There are times when an expert teacher needs to adjust the text/student interaction. Selective, non-continuous text reading can be arranged by a knowledgeable content teacher:

  1. Change in speed of reading text dependent on the difficulty of the text and importance of the concepts being presented
  2. Augmentation of the content in the form of extra text material
  3. Periodic reflection and conferencing with peers during reading to build engagement and understanding as students engage in active reading
  4. Content teachers / coaches act as guides for readers working their way through content print.

Study Guides

All of the coaching strategies that adjust print to students and students to print can be embraced by one or more of the study guides we will study in this module.

Study guides are questions, activities, visuals and related texts that teachers develop to assist students as they read textbooks and other printed material related to the course.

Guides Should Increase Interaction with Text and other Readers

Effective guides are not just questions at the end of reading; effective guides can be used before and during reading. These guides might include thought-provoking activities and questions to activate prior knowledge and engage readers before beginning the reading. Or, students may be asked to pause during reading and interact with peers and respond to key points in the text. The best guides provoke student thinking, cause them to interact with others, and make use of visuals and graphics to increase engagement and retention.

This module examines five types of study guides and one technology-based interactive activity.

  1. Anticipation Guides
  2. Process Guides
  3. Reading Road Maps
  4. Analogical Study Guides
  5. Interactive Guides
  6. WebQuests

Anticipation Guides

The Anticipation Guide (Herber, 1978; Readance, Bean, and Baldwin, 1989) is a series of statements that provoke students to inventory their knowledge and opinions about a topic before reading about it.  Students respond to several statements that challenge or support their preconceived ideas about key concepts to be read. This process arouses interest, sets purposes for reading, and encourages students to pose their own questions.  Anticipation guides prompt students to make connections to their own background knowledge as they read and assist them in determining what is most important in a passage. 

When creating an anticipation guide, the teacher first identifies the major ideas in the text.  The teacher then anticipates student experiences and beliefs that might be either supported or challenged by the reading.  In science for example, students may actually harbor misconceptions about some aspect of a topic.  The anticipation guide is developed to feature five or six statements that address major ideas, especially those that may contradict student beliefs. The most effective statements are those about which students have some knowledge but not necessarily a complete understanding. 

After completing the Anticipation Guide, students read the text, focusing upon information that confirms, elaborates, or rejects each of the statements in the anticipation guide.  If the print material being read can be marked, students can underline or highlight sections germane to each statement. (This is a great way to use sticky notes.)

When students have completed their reading, the teacher asks them to revisit their anticipation guides to evaluate how well they have understood the material and to insure that misconceptions have been corrected. You may have had a close encounter with Anticipation Guides in other Stout courses.

Process Guides (Book Marks!)

Process guides help students focus upon the reading skills and behaviors that will be necessary to comprehend content material. They differ significantly from a typical study guide or worksheet in that they are printed in strip form, longer and narrower than regular size paper. The process guide resembles a bookmark and can be placed in the appropriate, corresponding place in a text. Portions of the text that are important can be noted and referenced during the process of reading instead of referring back to the information at the end of the reading.

Key vocabulary, important statements or graphics can be referenced with probing questions found on the guide. Frequently the guides are a series of cloze-like sentence frames that focus student reading upon key points in the text. Usually, process guides are much shorter that other study guides and are flexible in use. They can be used to ask questions, emphasize critical text (also skip superfluous text) and probe charts or graphs. A collection of process guides (they are short and fast acting) can be used to review a chapter and allow student to work alone or in pairs.

It's a map!Reading Road Maps (Tripping Through Content!)

Reading Road maps are more visual that verbal. Using the analogy of a road trip, the reader is guided along a winding path of road signs telling the reader to

Accompanied by road signs or billboards directing the reader/ traveler to important headings or graphics, content readers take a trip through the material directed by the teacher.

This strategy works particularly well with the Intermediate (grades 3-5) learners.

Analogical Study Guides (Linking the New to the Known)

Analogies are powerful tools for learning new information. Students use the guides comparing the new content to something familiar in the content reader's prior knowledge. Analogical guides are not typical study guides. They frequently do not have questions or blanks to be completed. While they have many uses, analogy guides are especially suited to complex content information that may be very new to the learner. An analogy guide allows the instructor to link complex concepts to well-known prior experiences in readers.

For the middle and high school student, standardized tests focus on drawing analogies, and these types of study guides help train them to do so.

Interactive Guides (Figuring Things out Together)

In the Pearson and Fielding article, "Comprehension What Works," we read in an earlier module, the authors suggested that content comprehension is best worked out through group interaction.

Interactive Guides require students to pause in their individual reading and thinking to interact with others. That interaction can be in pairs, small groups, or involve the whole class.

Interactive guides use a variety of student-involvement activities which include reading to each other, predicting, summarizing or reflecting in ever changing group sizes. The teacher is able to maintain student interest and engagement with the reading selection through altering the interaction modes used as students process the content.

WebQuest (High Tech Study Guides!)

A WebQuest is a unique, technology-centered guide that can be of great use to the content area teacher. As you search for up-to-date, readable, highly motivating, yet credible content information, a WebQuest utilizing the Internet can be very useful.

Most students are Internet-experienced, using the web for a variety of purposes. A WebQuest utilizes all of the motivating features of technology combined with the richness of Internet content and teacher-selected web sites. Think of a WebQuest as high tech, teacher-developed study guide focusing upon a specific content. WebQuests can be combined with interactive guides or reading road maps to increase active student engagement.

With the introduction of tablets and lap tops into the schools, WebQuests can be easily conducted individually or as a group activity.

Proceed to Module Eleven Activities.