Overview

Research on reading comprehension has demonstrated that readers differ in how they approach reading and the meaning they construct from text. Researchers have found that good readers use specific strategies to comprehend text, and those instructional programs that explicitly teach these strategies have been successful in improving students’ comprehension. In this course, participants will examine teaching practices that help students in grades three through five develop concrete strategies for constructing meaning from both narrative and expository text. The goal for strategy instruction is to prepare students to become active and purposeful readers who think about their text before, during and after reading. Participants will also explore instructional procedures that help students learn how to coordinate key comprehension strategies.

Goals and Products

This online course will enable participants to

• Identify comprehension strategies that are important to teach
• Explore how to explicitly teach comprehension strategies and guide students’ practice in applying them
• Help students build story schema (background knowledge about stories) by showing how narrative text has recurring elements (story grammar): characters, settings, conflicts, major events, resolutions, and themes
• Help students draw on their story schema to make predictions about events, and consequences
• Help students distinguish common text structures in informational text in order to better understand and recall the main ideas of the text
• Help students understand how analyzing question-answer relationships (QAR) can be a useful strategy for approaching comprehension questions

Format and Requirements

This course is divided into six one-week sessions which each include readings, an activity and an online discussion among course participants. The time for completing each session is estimated to be two to four hours.

The outline for the course is as follows:

Throughout the course, participants will complete activities that they will add to a portfolio of their ideas from this course. Participants will leave the course with a toolkit of strategies and ideas to use in their own classrooms. As a final product, participants will evaluate their own comprehension instruction program and develop an action plan for making changes to better support reading comprehension in the classroom.

Prerequisites

This is an introductory course for teachers, technology specialists, curriculum specialists, professional development specialists, or other school personnel. Participants are expected to have regular access to computers. In addition, participants should be proficient with using email, browsing the Internet, and navigating to computer files.

Content and Technology Standards

This course, Promoting Reading Comprehension in the Elementary Classroom, will help participants support their students in meeting the following NCTE standards:

Standard 1: Students read a wide range of print and non-print texts to build an understanding of texts, of themselves, and of the cultures of the United States and the world; to acquire new information; to respond to the needs and demands of society and the workplace; and for personal fulfillment. Among these texts are fiction and nonfiction, classic and contemporary works.

Standard 2: Students read a wide range of literature from many periods in many genres to build an understanding of the many dimensions (e.g., philosophical, ethical, aesthetic) of human experience.

Standard 3: Students apply a wide range of strategies to comprehend, interpret, evaluate, and appreciate texts. They draw on their prior experience, their interactions with other readers and writers, their knowledge of word meaning and of other texts, their word identification strategies, and their understanding of textual features (e.g., sound-letter correspondence, sentence structure, context, graphics).

Standard 12:  Students use spoken, written, and visual language to accomplish their own purposes (e.g., for learning, enjoyment, persuasion, and the exchange of information).

In addition, this course will help participants meet the following title="http://cnets.iste.org/teachers/t_stands.html"
href="http://cnets.iste.org/teachers/t_stands.html" target="_blank">ISTE Educational Technology Standards and Performance Indicators for All Teachers:

Standard V. Productivity and Professional Practice
Teachers use technology to enhance their productivity and professional practice

Reproduced with permission from Education Development Center, Inc.,
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