Guided Reading Strategies to Improve Students - Dr. Stirling ...

Students were taught how to use graphic organizers to record the main character,the setting, the problem, the solution, and the resolution of a story. Afterwards,students were given end of selection (story) tests and their reading comprehensionskills were measured with the Qualitative Reading Inventory (1995) in second andthird grade. Anderson, O’Leary, Schuler, and Wright concluded that consistent useof graphic organizers, and an effective Guided Reading program increasedstudents’ comprehension skills.Several journal articles also shed some light on other ways to improve readingcomprehension using higher level thinking skills. Ketch (2005) argued thatconversation can be a vehicle to practice and learn comprehension skills. Inresearch conducted on proficient readers, seven common strategies that goodreaders use to comprehend text were identified:• making connections to the text, the world, and oneself,• questioning as one reads,• using mental imagery to make a movie in one’s mind,• determining importance,• inferring,• retelling and synthesizing, and• employing fix-up strategies to correct and monitor meaning.Explicit modeling of the strategies, authentic student discussions, practice andstudent reflection time, Ketch noted, helped students “to build empathy,understanding, respect for different opinions, and ownership of the learningprocess.”Five common formats used for classroom conversations were: 1) whole group, 2)small group, 3) Literature Circles, 4) think/pair/share, and 5) individualconferences between teachers and students.After over 30 years observing students using the strategies, Ketch came to thefollowing conclusion: Students actively engaged in the conversation processcan, over time, become reflective critical thinkers.Applegate, Quinn and Applegate (2002) promoted the idea of creating thoughtfulliteracy by studying different kinds of open-ended questions, and thinkinglevels used on eight of the most widely used informal reading inventories (IRIs).Four types of open-ended questions were classified: literal, low-level inference, highlevelinference, and response items. Two narrative passages and comprehensionquestions from pre-primer through sixth grade were analyzed. Narrative passageswere used because the researchers felt that “higher-level items are more likely tobe found in response to narrative text.”The researchers were particularly interested in what type of message the kind ofquestions asked on IRIs conveyed to students about reading. They found that mostof the questions on IRIs (91%) were recall or low-level inferences. On the mostdemanding IRIs, less than a fifth of the questions required more than basicrecall or low-level thinking. The researchers argued,If the IRIs that we use to assess children are insensitive to thedifferences between recalling and thinking about text, our ability toprovide evidence of any given child’s instructional needs, let alonehave an impact upon instruction, is severely limited.RESEARCH REPORT: Guided Reading Strategies to Improve Students’ Critical Thinking Skills in Grades Three, Four and Five7