Greetings all-
There are some excellent texts that discuss ways to help students
monitor comprehension and develop a more meaningful interaction with
texts.  Aiding comprehension requires a multifacted range of
strategies- such as ability to visualize, to make connections with the
text, to predict, infer, question, recognize the main points,
summarize, and synthesize.  Some excellent resources exist that aid
teachers in not only assessing whether students comprehend-  but also
providing concrete and helpful strategies for teaching our students to
to determine when their comprehension has broken down- and to know how
to repair it.  I strongly recommend the following texts which
emphasize the purposeful use of literature, and literacy strategies to
provide readers - of all ages- with strategies to truly make sense of
the texts that they read. This is by no means an exhaustive list- but
these are some of my favorite books to use with teachers....
1. Strategies that Work- Harvey, S. & Goudvis, A
2. I read it but I don't get it...Comprehension Strategies for
Adolescent Readers- Tovani, C.
3. Mosaic of thought: Teaching Comprehension in a reader's workshop-
Oliver Keene, E. & Zimmerman, S
4. Yellow Brick Road: Shared and Guided Paths to Independent Reading
4-12- Allen, J.

It is also an invaluable instructional plan to interview students and
to conduct Informal Reading Inventories, in order to determine
strategies and cueing systems that students use, in order to determine
strategies that would support them in their ability to read and make
sense of text.

I hope this list is helpful and I am very interested in hearing other
ideas, suggestions, and texts centered on teaching students to read
for meaning and to practice "metacomprehension."

Thanks
Teresa Fisher
Georgia State University


On 8/27/07, Gail Price <gprice at famlit.org> wrote:

>

>

> One way people can learn efficiently is to accurately evaluate their

> learning and decide how to proceed.

>

> This ability is known as "metacomprehension," and psychological research

> has repeatedly demonstrated that people are not very accurate at judging

> how well they have learned complex materials. As a result, researchers

> have been searching for techniques to improve the accuracy of people's

> judgments of their text learning, and most recently, some important

> discoveries have been made.

>

> In an article published in the August issue of Current Directions in

> Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological

> Science, Kent State researchers John Dunlosky and Amanda Lipko examined

> techniques that can improve people's comprehension of texts.

>

> After reviewing several studies, they found that rereading or

> summarizing text can improve people's ability to accurately evaluate how

> well they are learning those texts.

>

> In addition, techniques that focus people's attention on just the most

> important details of a text also help them to evaluate their learning.

>

> Read more...

> http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/08/070823142827.htm

>

>

>

> Perhaps the suggestions in the article may be helpful for those students

> who read and say, "I just don't get it."

>

>

>

>

>

>

>

> Gail J. Price

>

> Multimedia Specialist

>

> National Center for Family Literacy

>

> 325 W. Main Street, Suite 300

>

> Louisville, KY 40202

>

> gprice at famlit.org

>

> 502 584-1133, ext. 112

>

>

>

> ________________________________

>

>

>

>

>

>