Critical Reading for Content Areas

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Critical Reading for Content Areas

• Teach your students how to learn your content

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Why teach reading strategies?

• Research has shown that students can make
  significant improvement in reading comprehension
  when they are given instruction in strategies.

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Where do I begin?

• Understanding Metacognition
• Metacognition
• Definition  awareness and understanding one's
  thinking and cognitive processes thinking about
  thinking
• Students must be taught and reminded to think
  about and monitor their thinking and learning
  processes.

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What next?

• BE THE BRIDGE!

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Another old theory?

• Schema Theory is a theory of learning. Schema are
  organized, structured, clustered and abstract
  bodies of information that are generally
  conceptualized as networks of information in
  which the relationships among facts and actions
  are specified.

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Why is schema important?

• The theory hypothesizes that the schema a person
  uses during learning will determine how the
  learner interprets the task to be learned, how
  the learner understands the information, and what
  knowledge the learner acquires.

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Why is schema important?

• Schema theory describes the process by which
  readers combine their own background knowledge
  with the information in a text to comprehend that
  text. All readers carry different schemata
  (background information) and these are also often
  culture-specific.

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What does this mean for me?

• Schema-theoretic research highlights reader
  problems related to absent or alternate (often
  culture-specific) schemata, as well as
  non-activation of schemata, and even overuse of
  background knowledge.

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Whats the global implication?

• All human beings possess categorical rules or
  scripts that they use to interpret the world. New
  information is processed according to how it fits
  into these rules, called schema. These schema can
  be used not only to interpret but also to predict
  situations occurring in our environment.

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Whats the global implication?

• Think, for example, of a situation where you were
  able to finish another persons thoughts, or when
  someone asked you to pass that "thingamabob."
  Schema theorists suggest that you used your
  schema to predict what your conversation partner
  was going to say and to correctly interpret
  "thingamabob" as the hammer needed to nail
  something into the wall.

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I got it. Now what?

• Several instructional strategies logically follow
  from schema theory. The most important
  implication of schema theory is the role of prior
  knowledge in processing. In order for learners to
  be able to effectively process information, their
  existing schemas related to the new content need
  to be activated.

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A Simple Example

• Suppose you overheard the following conversation
  between roommates
• Did you order it?Yeah, it will be here in about
  45 minutes.Oh... Well, I've got to leave before
  then. But save me a couple of slices, okay?

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Youre Probably Correct!

• Do you know what the roommates are talking about?
  Chances are, you're pretty sure they are
  discussing a pizza they have ordered. But how can
  you know this? You've never heard this exact
  conversation, so you're not recalling it from
  memory. And none of the defining qualities of
  pizza are represented here, except that it is
  usually served in slices, which is also true of
  many other things.

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Another One

• The girl sat looking at her piggy bank. "Old
  friend," she thought, "this hurts me." A tear
  rolled down her cheek. She hesitated, then picked
  up her tap shoe by the toe and raised her arm.
  Crash! Pieces of Piggo--that was its name--rained
  in all directions. She closed her eyes for a
  moment to block out the sight. Then she began to
  do what she had to do.

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Showing our age??

• If you have a well-developed schema for "piggy
  banks", this story should be readily
  comprehensible. You would understand that
  traditional piggy banks were usually made of some
  fragile, brittle material, that they contained a
  slot for inserting and saving coins, and that the
  money could only be removed by breaking them.
• On the other hand, if you have no schema for
  piggy bank, the story probably makes little sense.

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More Depth to Schema Theory

• D. Rumelhart D. Norman (1978) proposed that
  there are three modes of learning accretion,
  structuring and tuning.
• Accretion is the addition of new knowledge to
  existing memory. Accretion is the most common
  form of learning.
• Structuring involves the formation of new
  conceptual structures or schema. Structuring
  occurs much less frequently and requires
  considerable effort
• Tuning is the adjustment of knowledge to a
  specific task usually through practice. Tuning is
  the slowest form of learning and accounts for
  expert performance.

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An Example of the Three Modes

• On learning Morse code Initial learning of the
  code is the process of accretion. Learning to
  recognize sequences or full words represents
  restructuring. The gradual increase in
  translation or transmission speed indicates the
  process of tuning.

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So whats my role?

• Since prior knowledge is essential for the
  comprehension of new information, teachers either
  need to
• help students build the prerequisite knowledge,
  or
• remind them of what they already know before
  introducing new material.

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Assess Activate Schema

• Teach text structure
• Preview reading
• Teach word analysis
• Focus on roots and affixes specific to your
  content
• Pull out and teach important/difficult vocabulary
  
• Use analogies and comparisons
• Ask for text-based predictions

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Vocabulary and Content

• Optic information and ALIKE BUT DIFFERENT

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BEFORE Anticipation Guide

• Part of the allure of manga is the right to left
  orientation.
• Kids and female consumers have been drawn in by
  manga more so than other similar formats.
• Manga sales have remained predominately static
  over the last 4 years.
• Manga is derived from anime.

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What the heck is MANGA?
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DURING REAP

• Manga Mania
• R read on your own
• E encode the text by putting the gist in your
  own words
• A annotate by writing down the main idea and
  the authors message
• P ponder what you read by thinking and talking
  with others in order to make connections, develop
  questions about the topic, and/or connect new
  information to prior knowledge

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AFTER Anticipation Guide

• Part of the allure of manga is the right to left
  orientation.
• Kids and female consumers have been drawn in by
  manga more so than other similar formats.
• Manga sales have remained predominately static
  over the last 4 years.
• Manga is derived from anime.

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AFTER Exit Slips

• Respond to one of the following
• One new thing I learned today.
• What questions do I still have?
• Within the first few weeks of school, I will try
  ___ with my students.

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