Elements of Comprehension

-Visualizing strategies (essential for narrative—not as essential for some expository text)
-Predictions (Purpose for reading)
-Questioning (knowing when you know and when you don’t know kind of thing)
-Making Connections to one’s own life, other literature
-Determining Importance of Text (Main & Supporting ideas).
-Here’s a hard one for students w/LD: Synthesizing information.

You are a lucky fellow to study & work with that distinguished, interesting, *humorous*, and gentele Dr. Mercer. Glad to hear that he’s still chirping along. Are you getting your Ph.D.?

In my schl district, we have study cadres where we discuss new books. (Sort of like Oprah for teachers…I’m on the reading one. Surprise.) One excellent comprehension-oriented book for regular education is “Strategies that Work” by Stephanie Harvey and Anne Goudvis. Another is “Mosiac of Thought”—that one is loaned out so I don’t have the author handy. I have a strong focus in regular education. I like this for sped because it keeps me from “dumbing down.” (And I teach some regular ed lessons in the classroom in a team teaching environment.) Some of my mild EMH kiddo’s cannot do all of it in comprehension, but they do what they can. Even some of my ED students have some difficult comprehension times.

With Visualizing, I use Nanci Bell’s stuff for kids with disabilities because it breaks down the steps. (I use her twelve structure words with everyone—they move to writing it very quickly while my LD’s do not.) Might be nice to have the other strategies more broken down. I’ll have 4 kids with autism (YIKES!) next year. I’m going to need all the comprehension strategies I can get.

I’m excited about your new work.

Susan,

I loved you post that you work so hard not to dumb down your ld kids. My son has been dumbed down even in his strenghts. It is such a shame that kids many times aren’t given the opportunity to achieve their potentials.

So how do we know what is someone’s potential until they are adults? If anyone ever tells you that IQ measurement is static (stays the same), don’t believe them. Schools filled my head with that drivel and Howard Gardner opened a whole new world. I’ve seen to many dynamic IQ’s to believe that they just stay the same. The theory was nice, but doesn’t test-out in the real world.

The human brain is too complex to bottleneck into a few test scores. However, all we have right now is the WISC/Stanford Binet world of IQ measurement. We just have to realize that it isn’t a measure of *potential* like we originally believed.

I’ll climb off my soapbox now.

Susan,

I agree that IQ tests can’t judge potential. My 10 yr. old son scored low end of the WISC III. My theory is that he could not do some of the test because he hadn’t been taught how to do some of the material.

He is not a dumb kid he amazes me with his math talents, his directional abilities are also amazing.

He was not taught in school using reading material or programs that made sense to him. Lucky for us we got a great reading teacher to do phonographix with him and his light went on.

For the first time in his life he is reading without being told to do so.

I believe everyone has strengths and weaknesses and if someone can show us a way to learn that make sense to us we can learn. Our weaknesses won’t disapper, but if we can find the key we can deal with the weakness.

unfortunately, it’s all we have. I would agree that potential develops in adulthood - otherwise there would be total understanding why some animal species eat their young! I continue to believe that what a person believes they can do and not what they can’t do creates success. It might take longer and be a lot more work for some, but the quest is worth it.

I teach a program called Feuerstein’s Instrumental Enrichment. He believes that IQ is not static and that with mediation it can change. Feuerstein has developed an alternative assessment called the learning potential assessment device or the LPAD. This assessment works like this, it measures cognitive skills by first testing the student then, teaching the skill and then retesting. This finds the potential for learning. His theory is that there are not retarded individuals just retarded performers. If you would like to read more about this wonderful man go to this website.http://www.icelp.org/
I teach this program to many of the LD and mildly retarded individuals at my school. I watched a video of teachers at his school working with twin boys who did not even speak at the beginning by the end of the video they were doing very complex tasks and interacting appropriately for their age.

***

But thanks, anyway.

Teaching author’s viewpoint.

How about one from the top of Bloom’s heap: evaluating.

I pulled out an older book titled, “Strategies for Success” by Lynn J. Meltzer. Good example of what’s on the market. Dr. Mercer probably knows her since he knows everyone.

Besides the elements mentioned by Susan Long, another element which I did not realize to be important until this year (kid is almost 12), is syntax. Mine has difficulty figuring out who did what in complex sentences with lots of dependent clauses. I find teaching grammar by diagramming sentences ala The Complete Book of Diagrams from www.riggsinst.org to be extremely helpful as diagramming is a way of representing complex language in a visual way. It is a pity that this useful concept has fallen out of favor.

While I am not clear on exactly what this program is intended to look like, I do agree that there are several ways to approach comprehension. We can simply read and ask questions from Bloom’s taxonomy. This is testing, not teaching.

I believe teaching comprehension has to do as much with setting the stage at the outset as it does with questioning after the reading.

Good reading comprehension instruction in a reading group setting requires the asking of probing questions before the reading, followed by “why do you think so?” We need to get children to examine their thinking. We can help them to do this by asking leading questions and by modeling the process of examining our own thinking.

To read is to comprehend and to comprehend is really to think. Since we rarely remove the passage from a child in the instructional setting or even in a standardized test setting, then we are not testing memory, we are testing how well a child can use the information they already possess along with that contained within the passage to think.

So, I like a program that instructs the teacher to ask for predictions and requires the student to defend these predictions. No lazy brain stuff allowed. I provide highlighters to my students so they can highlight sentences that offer proof or support for their answers. Somehow building this element into a program would be important to me, a special ed. resource teacher. I believe models, or think alouds, are a crucial aspect of TEACHNG youngsters to comprehend. Can the program incorporate this feature?

I also very much agree with Shirin that syntax is an issue. Complex and less regular sentence structures do confuse many children. The issue is to teach syntax from a functional standpoint from the outset, with the intent that the students will learn to generate a variety of sentences themselves. There are various “writing” programs, in addition to the program Shirin likes, that teach sentence structure. I personally avoid traditional diagramming because I struggled with this during school, as did most of my classmates. The manner in which it was taught was NOT conducive to improving comprehension skills or written language. I have not looked at the Riggs materials, so I cannot assume that criticism is true of them as well.

Good luck, please let us know when this program is ready or if you want it tested here or there, maybe you will have some takers.

When working with dyslexic students(emotionally disturbed teens), I try to
use a multi-faceted approach, involving auditory, visual, tactile, kinesthetic.
For instance, in introducing main ideas, I put a number of related articles
in a bag, tell the student to take them out, and make an educated guess as to
what they have in common.Upon doing so, I congratulate them on finding the
main idea. I then move on to sets of words, one of which is the main idea of
the others.

When teaching literary elements such as characterization, setting, mood, etc.,
I teach these individually through movies, familiar and unfamiliar, the reason
being is that it is easier to identify these elements initially when seeing the story
visually. That way, they are relieved of the additional burden of reading the
words. Then, when they are adept at identifying the literary element visually
through the movie, they can more easily identify in a story that they DO read.
One movie I love when teaching elements of characterization is “It’s a Wonderful Life”. It is rich in characterization……..the decent George Bailey,
the villainous Mr. Potter……..and the film makes it relatively easy to discover
HOW we know they are the way they are…….their words, actions,whatever.

My list could go on……..these are just two ideas. Let me know if you would
like to hear more!

Diagramming sentences has fallen out of favor with me because it becomes
for the student another task he has to learn which may or may not make
language easier to understand.The difficulty of learning diagramming makes
sense if it helps the student make sense of language. With mine, it has not…….
it has only served to frustrate them more and make language-learning more
irksome.

Anitya………can we team teach?? LOL

I too am a sp. ed. resource teacher who also teaches self-contained students.
I agree with every single thing you said!! The ultimate goal of the reading
process is to think on what is being written. Questions like “What do you
think is going on in this story…….how do you know……..what part of the
passage makes you think so……….” not only guide the students to think
beyond the literal, but ultimately makes the reading process so much more
enjoyable!

Thank you for your input.

I think you teach comprehension by directly modeling how a good reader omprehends. Then provide guided practice. For example, I read a picture book to my class and talk about how I connect to the text. I may discuss how it reminds me of something in my own life, another book I have read or something I saw on the news. Then, I read the text again and I ask the student about anything it reminds them of and how this helps them understand the story. We would do this with many different text of many different genre always together. Then, they would read independently and make notes of their connections and how the connections helped their comprehension. Finally, the students share their comprehension and their connections. Comprehension is not answering literal questions. It is far more that that. Students need to be taught how to interact with the text. My favorite quote about reading is “The reader writes the story” This is exactly it! This interaction is true comprehension

is different than taking a book and having kids do tasks that are at different levels of Blooms. At least, I think so.

I particularly notice synthesis because, while I do it well, I have a difficult time teaching others to synthesize what they have read (or to what they have listened—implied).

Have you read this Jerome Rosner book? Email privately if you wish to respond, but don’t wish to post.

I really appreciate Anitya’s, Jim in New Orleans’, and Nan’s insights. They are so true. As an LD resource teacher myself, I would simply like to add one thought to their excellent ideas. When the teacher teaches comprehension, s/he sets the purpose for reading, asks the probing questions, helps make the connections. The trick is for the KIDS to learn to ask themselves those questions and make those connections. Because we teachers aren’t attached to our students at the hip, our goal must be to make them independent in what we’re modeling for them! I know I lose sight of that sometimes, so caught up am I in the strategies themselves. Unless the kids can use them on their own, they’ll be on our caseloads forever! Ken, in writing your book with Drs. Mercer and Morris, in addition to identifying your excellent comprehension strategies, you might want to address the issue of independent functioning!

Maybe I missed it somewhere. What is the title?

Comprehension is tricky because it cannot be taught in the same sense you can teach decoding skills or math facts. Makes decoding skills pretty darn easy to teach by comparison. I also believe, and may be slammed for this, that intelligence has a significant affect on comprehension competency, even with good teaching, unlike decoding which I don not believe is significantly impacted by intelligence.

I have a child who has a HFA diagnosis and I have a devil of a time teaching him comprehension. He is literal, totally literal, and we don’t seem to get transfer from one situation to another. Everything has to be explicitely taught, all the nuances of language. All the good teaching in the world has not changed much in the way of his ability to pick up a new selection, read and answer inferential, evaluative and synthesis questions successfully. Once you teach it to him, he may get it, but move on to the next selection and you start over. It is a slow process and he has average intelligence.

Rosner, Jerome. (1993). Helping children overcome learning difficulties. (3rd ed.) New York: Walker & Co.

Now, your IQ statement. Your opinion certainly has been the ed norm for many, many decades. Since intelligence and dendritic growth are not static like we originally believed, then ability is not static either.

What I do believe we can agree upon in the ability arena: Some children are not ready for the thinking skills we’ve pushed upon them on a given day. There are other dots, farther back in the sequence, they’ve not connected for a potentially huge variety of reasons. But when I see that kids connect everything up to synthesis, I want a cadre of strategies with which to teach. That’s why I threw it into the mix. Because I’m a natural synthesizer, I have never been very good at analyzing the tasks involved. I’m sure some grad student out there somewhere has done it…

I agree with you that decoding/word recognition has fewer variables on the surface: getting it into memory and retrieving it has a significant number of variables. Comprehension has many, many facets—we sure agree on that point!

Barb, absolutely. Part of teaching anything is a gradual release of responsibility. The key to this is gradual. The teacher has to model and offer guided practice and then gradually have students take over responsibility for the use of the strategies. Lots of discussion and sharing will help students to discuss their comprehension of the stories.

The Jerome Rosner book is most excellent. He starts with the premise that
anyone at any age level, regardless of disability/experience/frustration level,
can learn to read. He then discusses some theories on language and
phonetic awareness, but what makes the book are the chapters toward the
end, where he takes you through a cookbook-style step-by-step process of
teaching decoding as applied to a tremendous amount of word lists at the
back of the book. It has become my “bible” for teaching word identification
skills. He teaches phonetic awareness by utilizing the idea that words are
best taught through sound units(i.e., ra-, ba-, ca-, etc.) rather than trying to
sound out one letter at a time. Syllabication is critical to this process. There
are also a number of exercises that help maintain a sense of auditory
discrimination. It really is an excellent technique, and the only one I have used
that has been successful with ALL my students.

Comprehension is not addressed as fully……I have my own methods,
mentioned in one of the posts, for teaching that. But for rapid teaching of
word identification, I have yet to see a better book. I believe the book is
called “Teaching Reading to Students With Learning Difficulties”. (I don’t have
the book with me, it’s at school) So useful is it that I’ve had to buy two copies,
as an aid has “made off with it”……LOL. I will have to start keeping it under
lock and key. Feel free to e-mail me if you wish! I bought both copies of mine
at Barnes and Noble….a great place for the latest research on learning
difficulties, by the way.

Jim in New OrleansSusan Long wrote:
>
> is different than taking a book and having kids do tasks that
> are at different levels of Blooms. At least, I think so.
>
> I particularly notice synthesis because, while I do it well,
> I have a difficult time teaching others to synthesize what
> they have read (or to what they have listened—implied).
>
> Have you read this Jerome Rosner book? Email privately if
> you wish to respond, but don’t wish to post.

***

Jim et al
I’m reading and saving every post and will be reviwing all valid input during the next couple of months on this project. From all I’ve read so far, our team is on teh right track - we may even be ahead of the game - it would be nice to strike another blow for kids. Thanks to all, Ken

Barb,
Whether through overt or covert methods, we are always working on “independent functioning” often calling it the “generalization” of a skill. If our tactics don’t carry beyond the world of our classroom, we have failed.

One time I was teaching in northern Saskatchewan (the place where we think people in North Dakota are urban southern wimps) and I was chatting with another teacher; somehow the discussion got onto the variability of IQ.

She said that she had no faith in IQ at all; when she was young, she had been given an IQ score of 80. This would have meant she was borderline retarded, not able to even complete an academic high school curriculum much less a university degree.

But, she went on, it was obvious to her even as a primary school child that the IQ tests were totally inappropriate and had an extreme cultural bias. The tests were mostly picture based for the primary grades, and what were the pictures? Department stores, escalators, elevators, cars, highways, electric kitchen gadgets, and so on. Coming from a rural northern Saskatchewan homestead in the 1940’s, she had never seen any of those things in her life. But as she mentioned, if they had shown pictures of swathers or harrows or combines, she would have been a genius.

This may be an extreme case, but this kind of thing is all too common with IQ testing. Take note and consider all test scores with an eye to where they come from.

This is one of those things specific to the USA that the rest of us in other parts of the world do not understand at all. I was taught in very very traditional schools, and we learned grammar three times over, in English, French, and Latin. We knew grammar!

Interestingly, we learned formal grammar first in French, since you can’t make up the most simple declarative sentence in French without knowing subject and verb and adjectives and gender, so we started French grammar in Grade 3; as is typical, teaching of English grammar was not very formalized until Grade 6 or 7. So when my brother and I got into a wrangle over what was correct in English and why, we fell back on French gramatical terms because we knew them well. This is of course one of the advantages of learning a second language, that it gives you an objective platform to view your own language from.
(Yes, that is a sentence ending with a preposition, and Winston Churchill thought it was a practical construction so I’ll accept him as an authority.)

Anyhow, I am very good at grammar in several languages, I work as a proofreader, and I never saw a sentence diagram until I was an adult, and couldn’t construct one if you paid me. Nor could 99% of the students in both English and other languages in other countries of the world.

Sentence diagramming might be useful, as shirin has found it, as a “looking back” exercise for a student at a fairly advanced level to use in post-reading analysis.
Many of us have very large questions about it as a basic teaching technique; as an introduction it seems to lead to incredible frustration and a hatred of the entire subject of grammar.
Diagramming sentences, along with learning the math tables up to twelve and beyond, speed drills with flash cards, memorizing all the state capitals, doing a spelling list by memory every week, having homework every night, doing all number work whatsoever in pencil, and so on, is one of those shibboleths of certain people who have a fixed view of the “good old days”. While any of these activities might be useful in certain circumstances (except for the neurosis that won’t allow some people to ever write any number in pen), some people mistake the surface for the content and think that if you just do these things you will have a good education. So when I see this one I like to drop a word of concern and suggest appropriate place and time and level.

You have a lot of good ideas so I’m just going to add a few follow-ups here.

A small point about prediction — a wonderful tool if it’s real, a disaster as it has often been misused.
“Whole-language” devotees have the opinion (not at all backed up by fact) that you can predict the next word in a book, so if you don’t know what it is you should just say what you think it should be. As most of here have seen, this is a truly awful reading habit that has to be gotten rid of before a person can become a real reader. Some kids go off and invent long stories but nothing at all like what is in the book, and this is hard to break out of.
I have seen some other teachers who go far overboard in their “prereading” sessions; they discuss and predict and look at the pictures and let out hints until basically the whole story is known without reading it. For those of us who can read, this spoils the anticipation and makes the reading into a dull chore. For those who can’t, it allows them to pass “reading” for several years until there is a sudden disaster in Grade 4 (familiar anyone?); it also gives them a warped picture of what reading is about and this is yet another hard thing to unlearn.
Prediction as a what-if exercise, and a comparison of predictions to what actually turns out (and to my mind a good book or movie is one you can not predict!) is another kettle of fish. It’s important to make that distinction.

Yes, synthesis is the killer. And analysis runs it a close second..
I find that glaring faults in comprehension show up when I am teaching math. The students can read the words in the problem, can tell you what they mean, and can sometimes even get reasonable intonation in their sentences. But then they are lost.
Many students cannot even follow a simple direction — even when the math problem is pre-digested for them and divided up into steps (a) through (d) and step (a) says to draw the rectangle, they don’t do it.
Even those who are past that level stall entirely. I spend hours and hours going over: What is the question asking? What do you need to find? What do you know about this object (area, perimeter, cost, derivative, slope, whatever)? Did you do a problem that looked like this in class? It is amazing how many students can actually solve the problem when they just pay attention to what it is asking.
What really shows up the comprehension weakness is the lack of transfer. A problem is asked that looks a tiny bit different than the ones that have been coached, and the student looks at it like he has never seen the book before. I constantly have to ask: What is the subject you have been studying for the last three months? Slope and derivatives? OK, why not try using slope and derivatives on this problem?
What really worries me anout this is not that students sometimes have to be helped, but that they look at me as if I’m from another planet because nobody has ever asked them those kinds of questions before.

Unfortunately, the standard methods of teaching math are actively anti-comprehension — memorize this, don’t ask questions; fill in these twenty formulae and don’t waste time; do this worksheet and we don’t have time for that silly problem-solving (and what do people do in real life, I keep asking). The when comprehension is needed at high school and college level, it isn’t there — the reading and computation may be at high school, but the comprehension quit developing around Grade 3, and we do have a problem.

I mention this at length because coaching towards multiple-choice testing can lead to the same pattern in reading and writing.

Victoria,
I agree with you completely about all the things we’ve done lately to insure no thinking goes on. These stories we’re working on will have no pictures, per se, mostly maps and charts. An illustration will show up to show that which is difficult to explain - a picture of Leonardo’s flying machine or a picture of an anemone - both of which many children do not have pictures in their minds. The only use I see in multiple choice is to give children an experience with multiple choice - the favored means of testing in this country.

As you have so nicely noted, teaching comprehension will also involve trying to teach thinking. My precision teaching roots say go back to the beginning and work from there. These same roots tell me to always assess - the more frequent the assessment the more valid the teaching.

thanks, this is another “keeper”, Ken

You know, Susan, we can go on and on with this point. It is interesting to debate, that is why I do it. I like an intellectual challenge.

When I was in college we were taught that no one really can be considered M.R. until they reach adulthood and have NOT reached what Piaget referred to as “formal operations.” Now, I don’t want to argue Piaget at this time and I am not up to speed there, anyway.

I do think that we could suggest that some people seem to “know” things and to perceive things and to connect dots readily, with minimal coaching. We may call these persons gifted intellectually. Others catch things when they are taught, they may be average folks. Others need much more.

Yes, it may be possible, given the TIME and good strategies, to “teach” a great deal more about “cognition” than we currently do. Using certain strategies, it may be possible to lead, lower “ability” youngsters step-by-step to greater thinking skills. I believe there has been work done in this area, but I have not read it per se. What I would question is the extent to which some children can transfer these newly learned thinking skills to other situations. If the learning turns out to be too situation specific, then we probably don’t have as much native ability to work with, in that particular area. I have not been greatly successful with my high functioning autism student in transferring higher order thinking skills to new situations.

The final issue is time and how much of it I actually have. One of the toughest parts of my job is allocating time to the many children and tasks that are called for. I have what is within the school day, students in K-6, and I have to teach math skills, the whole range of reading skills, spelling and written language skills. I have to prioritize and the time to do the intensive therapy work such as may be fruitful in some cases with raising verbal intelligence, is not really available to me. It is never easy to do this prioritizing and I never really feel that I can do justice to all I would like.

When I make comments about teaching, it is within the context of the time allowed. If I had an experiemental therapy program and I had all day to teach a small group of students intensively, using the state of the art knowledge…….more gains of this sort may be made.

I find that spreading myself and my teaching too thin, a day on this and a day on that, usually does not produce the necessary effect for a learning disabled child. I generally need to roll up my sleeves and work daily, provide lots of guided practice to assist my students to begin to independently apply skills that many peers just seem to do naturally.

On the one hand I have said word reading has little to do with intelligence, on the other hand, everything has to do with intelligence. Howard Gardner would consider a superior athlete to have superior bodily-kinesthetic intelligence. When I heard him almost 10 years ago, my eyes were opened and my thinking of what intelligence is was forever changed. It is all intelligence and theoretically, if we had enough time, we could teach it all. But that is an abstract theory we may never have the time or luxury to prove.

Maybe we need another word to replace intelligence or IQ, maybe ease of learning quotient.

Nonetheless, I appreciate your dedication, your thoughtfulness and your willingness to raise issues. Thanks for your thoughts and your time.

Ken, I do like to use multiple choice for teaching. Yes, we do much standardized testing. I think to some degree, comprehension is almost more of a gestalt. Yes, we can ask probing questions, yes we can model our thinking process, yes we can assist the child to connect all the dots, but when all is said and done if the child cannot perceive the whole that has emerged from this, where are we? I do see students who cannot put things together and find the words themselves. So, a multiple choice program allows us to evaluate the 4-5 options in light of the question, and is another way to assist the child in grasping the kind of thinking and response a particular kind of question is asking for.

I have been using a program from Teacher Created Materials, with Edward Fry’s name on it. All the reading is content area. The first page in a unit offers a single sentence and asks about 5 true-false questions about the sentence. Gets at that sentence level of understanding, not diagramming, but forces us to dig into what a sentence is saying and is NOT saying. Next is a paragraph, followed by about 5 multiple choice questions, varying levels from a taxonomy. Lastly, the student reads the entire selection and answers about 8 m.c. questions. Then there is a follow-up that may be reading a diagram, map, graph, and then an enrichment activity. Selections are interesting and fun to read.

I’ll take an average kid with lots of drive over one labeled gifted who thinks he or she is superior. But that’s a whole new debate and I’m getting ready to go back to school. I have to report in about a week. Until then, I’ll be getting a new room ready and attending meetings and workshops that are outside our contract time.

On a grander note, I went to my new school today (they’re moving me to elementary and the preventive model, from the middle school). I cleaned out a room of two retired sped teachers so that I could begin to set the room up for myself. I found about 4 different SRA programs, including DISTAR, and…a *full set* of Dick & Jane readers from the late 50’s! I could remember carrying my little readers to my little group. I felt like I was walking down a path of career memories: It was touching to see all the different things these teachers pursued with the hope of success.

I’ve enjoyed discussing with you. My time on-line will be limited for the next few weeks. I have tons to do but will look it. (I’d forgotten how habit-forming this becomes!)

I agree with you wholeheartedly on the drive and resilience. Good luck with the new job. Let us know how things go, what you are doing, the students you work with, etc.