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Reading & comprehending social studies material. TE 407 – Helmsing – 11/28/2011. comprehension. Ideas about reading have changed throughout the history of education. Today, the dominant belief is readers are not passive receivers of information from printed materials
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Reading & comprehending social studies material TE 407 – Helmsing – 11/28/2011
comprehension • Ideas about reading have changed throughout the history of education. Today, the dominant belief is readers are not passive receivers of information from printed materials • Readers interact with text and construct meaning from it. (This is unlike how many college students engage with voluminous reading for class.) • Comprehension is a cognitive process: • Recognizing words and relating them to previously learned information • Making inferences and judgments through connections
The challenge of social studies • Students’ comprehension may be the most significant challenge novice teachers face in their teaching • Social studies often deals with places and cultural practices that students may have never encountered • Several abstract concepts (e.g. democracy, détente, alienation) • Many specialized concepts and complex visual data (e.g. filibuster, political cartoons, primary sources, GNP tables) • Three aspects of reading comprehension in social studies are essential to understand: • Building on prior knowledge • Metacognition about the text • Reading strategies for engaging the text
Prior knowledge • A combination of the learner’s preexisting attitudes, experiences, and knowledge • It is a critical variable in reading comprehension: it may be seen as incomplete, but it’s mostly because students fail to relate their prior knowledge to information in the text • Culturally relevant or culturally responsive pedagogies often take into consideration students’ “funds of knowledge” and lived experiences • Help students link content to their lives
metacognition • Helps students think about the text and how the text is presented/structured • Teachers and students should be able to identify these text characteristics • Text organization (statements of purpose and rationale, orgnaization of material, timelines, charts) • Explication of ideas (definitions, facts, ideas, statements) • Conceptual density (number of new concepts, ideas, and vocabulary introduced in a text; the higher the number the more complex the text) • Metadiscourse (“breaking the wall” – when an author points something out) • Instructional devices (tabels of contents, headings, annotations, indices, question boxes, activities)
Strategies for comprehension • Determine importance – looking for main ideas • Summarize information – synthesize a passage • Draw inferences – draw conclusions • Generate questions – what are students thinking? • Monitor comprehension – checking for understanding and confusion
Acronyms for some strategies • K-W-L Plus—Know-Want to Know-Learned • PLAN—Predict/Locate/Add-Note • RAFT—Role/Audience/Format/Topic • REAP—Read/Encode/Annotate/Ponder • REST – Record/Edit/Synthesize/Think • SQ3R—Survey/Question/Read/Recite/Review • TPRC—Think/Predict/Read/Connect