Content Finder

Two important reports summarize what we know about effective literacy instruction for adolescent readers.

One excellent research-based strategy to help students understand what the question is demanding is called the Question-Answer relationship (QAR). This strategy helps students decipher where the answer to the question can be found:  “right there” in the text, whether it’s a question asking them to pull together pieces of information found throughout the text, whether they need to answer based on their own experience, or a little of each of those! Typically it’s the questions based on implicit information that gives students the most difficulty.

Sustained silent reading (SSR) time is beneficial for most adolescent readers, but we must be careful to not consider it a solution or intervention for struggling readers. First, let me address SSR as beneficial for most students. The more students (of all ages) read, the more their reading skills improve and their vocabulary grows. We also know that motivation and self-directed learning is critical to promote more reading by teenagers.

We have two strategies within our Classroom Strategy section that help students organize information while they’re reading. One is called Selective Highlighting and the other is called Power Notes. Both these strategies are fully described and have examples, too. Both strategies seek to have students organize the important information within a text, and can be used across content areas.