Students may need help in learning to apply reading skills to study techniques when preparing for class discussions, tests, and report writing. They can improve their comprehension if they learn to see how ideas are connected in an entire piece of writing.
1. Have the students skim and assigned passage to get a general idea of the content and overall organization. Ask them to discuss the article briefly as a group, then assess how well they have understood the whole passage.
2. Instruct the students to make notes in the margins about important ideas within and across paragraphs. You might model this step with a transparency of the reading and an example of your own notes for the first paragraph or so. One possibilty is to give the students a chance to try writing marginal notes about the key ideas for one paragraph and then show them your model or elicit their sugeestions.
3. Have students work on their own, making brief marginal notes in their own words of ideas from each paragraph. Special care should be taken to recognize relationships among ideas extending across paragraphs.
4. Divide students into pairs or small groups. Have them compare their marginal notes. After they have made good headway, hand out blank transparencies to each group and have them outline the passage or part of the passage on the transparency.
5. Show outlines from two or more groups , simultaneously if possible. Have students compare similarities and differences with their own group outlines. Encourage questions about why certain points were or were not included in the outline. After discussing the outlines.Have students assess how their comprehension changed from the first , cursory reading to the second during which they took their marginal notes.
6. Using a student generated outline, have the students summarize the article orally or in writing. Ask the students not to look at the original while they are summarizing. These summaries can be used to test comprehension.
7. As students become used to this procedure, they can begin writing and comparing their outlines , instead of notes, with those of their classmates.
8. Semantic maps or other representations of organizational structure may be substituted for outlines.
9. This series of reading activities should be practiced several times throughout a term so that the students begin to acquire independent note-taking strategies.
10. If students are not familiar with outlining or mapping techniques, teachers may have students take marginal notes to fill in partially completed outlines or topic maps. Guidance through the procedure should gradually decrease .
11. Not all passages lend themselves to paragraph analysis. Students may need some help incorporating ideas from two or more paragraphs into one section of an outline .