Teaching Effective Comprehension Strategies to Students with Learning and Reading Disabilities PHILIP N.

S W A N S O N AND SUSAN D E L A PAZ

Photo by Lance Schriner

In this article, we summarize several metacognitive strategies designed to improve reading comprehension in students with learning and reading disabilities and describe an instructional model showing how to teach comprehension strategies to students. Each recommended strategy has been formally evaluated and found to be effective for improving students' reading comprehension. Practical suggestions are also provided to help teachers implement these strategies in their classrooms.

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roficient readers typically execute one or more metacognitive behaviors as they read. For example, as they read this article, teachers may consider using one of the recommended comprehension strategies in their classrooms, leading them to form questions such as, "How can I modify these strategies to better meet the needs of my students?" After reading, they may also choose to make a brief summary of the procedures necessary7 for teaching a speINTERVENTION IN SCHOOL AND CLINIC

cific strategy. Moreover, for details they cannot recall, some readers will "look back" until they locate the information they need and then reread that section. These are examples of some of the strategies good readers use to promote comprehension. Many competent readers are not aware that these actions require metacognitive skills; rather, good comprehenders engage in these strategic behaviors because they have proven, over time, to be useful (Pressley et al., 1995). In addition, proficient adult readers seldom recall being explicitly taught how to comprehend text; nevertheless, they have become strategic readers. Researchers have consistently demonstrated that poor readers, unlike good readers, do not acquire strategic reading behaviors by themselves, and that poor readers need to be taught how, where, and when to consistently carry out such procedures. For example, Garner and Reis (1981) noted that poor readers do not look back to reread sections in their texts as often as good readers, and they fail to monitor their comprehension. Raphael and Pearson (1985) found that poor readers often seem VOL. 33, No. 4, MARCH 1998 (PP. 209-218) 209

to ignore or be unaware that different assignments pose different kinds of questions (whether, for example, questions are literal, require an integration of the text, or rely on prior knowledge), and they often use strategies that are inappropriate for task requirements. In addition, according to Oakhill and Patel (1991), poor readers do not make inferences from text and do not integrate ideas from different parts of the text in order to create accurate representations. Even when such students are able to decode words correctly, they typically do not attend to the meaning of the passage, relate what is being read to their previous knowledge, or monitor their own comprehension (Bos & Vaughn, 1994). Therefore, students who have difficulty comprehending text need to be taught explicitly how to carry out appropriate strategies so that their reading comprehension improves. Although emerging and poor readers tend not to read strategically, resulting in limited comprehension of text, researchers have criticized how classroom teachers usually teach reading comprehension. Durkin (1979) observed several general education fourth-grade classrooms and found less than 1% of the total time devoted to reading instruction was spent explicitly teaching students to comprehend texts. She further noted that when instruction did occur, teachers merely monitored students' comprehension by asking questions after they finished reading a passage, rather than teaching specific procedures to help students improve their comprehension skills. Similar findings were reported by Duffy and Mclntyre (1982), who observed primary-grade teachers in Grades 1 through 6. In response to such findings, theorists and intervention researchers have developed numerous strategies that students can be taught directly to help them improve their reading comprehension skills. To briefly summarize these approaches, students are shown various frameworks, models, or strategies for understanding and interpreting written information. Students are also taught self-regulatory procedures, such as self-monitoring, to help them become aware of and execute specific cognitive behaviors aimed at helping them understand what they read. These procedures become metacognitive strategies when students intentionally recruit and use them to meet various task demands. These strategies may be thought of as scaffolds, which support and facilitate learners as they internalize procedures, or heuristics, which allow them to successfully complete comprehension tasks (Harris & Graham, 1996). Teachers obviously share the common goal of helping students with learning and reading problems to view reading as more than a required activity done each day in reading class; rather, teachers want students to see reading as an activity that occurs in many settings and for different purposes—reading for a history class, reading a novel for relaxation, taking a test during a job application, or following directions for setting a VCR. By 210

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teaching students a variety of reading comprehension strategies and helping them learn to use them independendy, teachers help students to develop an arsenal of approaches to comprehend texts regardless of the specific task or situation. Thus, when situations arise that require comprehending new text, students will be able to reflect upon the battery of strategies they know and determine which will be appropriate for helping in a given situation. OVERALL APPROACH Pressley and colleagues (1995), as well as numerous other intervention researchers (e.g., Collins, 1997; Ellis, 1994; S. Graham, Harris, MacArthur, & Schwartz, 1997), have advocated teaching students strategies in contexts that are relevant and appropriate for their use. Thus, strategies are not taught as curricular options in and of themselves (Deshler & Shumaker, 1986); rather, they are integrated as part of the regular program (Harris & Graham, 1992, 1996). Students learn to use strategies as the need arises and when a particular set of heuristics is appropriate for an assigned task (Pressley et al., 1995). In addition to this basic principle, teachers need to understand bow to teach comprehension strategies so that students will learn to use them autonomously. Intervention researchers have used different terms to describe their teaching models; S. Graham, Harris, and colleagues (Graham, Harris, MacArthur, & Schwartz, 1991; Harris & Graham, 1992, 1996) have used the term self-regulated strategy development (SRSD), for example, whereas Ellis (1994) has used the phrase integrated strategies instruction. Instructional supports underlying these approaches are similar; however, when describing how to teach one or more of the strategies in this article, we have generally adopted the SRSD model (Harris & Graham, 1992, 1996; see Figure 1). Readers should keep the following general points in mind as they prepare to teach specific comprehension strategies. First, start with simple materials (i.e., easier reading levels) to ensure initial success; then help students practice using a given comprehension strategy with more challenging text. Second, individualize instruction by deciding (a) what strategy is most likely to benefit a given group of students, (b) which type of selfregulatory procedure is relevant for each student, and (c) how to give specific feedback to each student to monitor his or her progress in using the target strategy and overall success in comprehending text. Third, teachers should realize that it may be hard, initially, to fade instructional supports (such as prompting) because students are often unsure whether they are implementing various components of the strategy correctly. Finally, students with learning and reading disabilities must be explicitly taught to generalize whichever metacognitive

(it

^

1. Describe the target comprehension strategy. Explicitly describe the strategy steps, and discuss why the strategy should be used, what it accomplishes, and when and where the strategy may be used. 2. Activate background knowledge. Review information students may have learned previously that is necessary for learning the target strategy. 3. Review current performance level. Provide feedback to students regarding their current level of functioning and reiterate potential benefits of the strategy. Goals for and commitment by the students should be reached collaboratively. 4. Modeling of the strategy and self-instructions. Demonstrate how to use the strategy in a meaningful context, and use relevant self-regulatory behaviors by thinking out-loud. Self-statements include ideas such as "What should I do first?" "I am using this strategy so that I can understand what I am reading better../'; or "I need to take my time," which show students the purpose of the procedures and how to manage their performance. 5. Collaborative practice. Provide several opportunities for student practice using the strategy and self-statements as a whole class, in small groups, or in pairs. Monitor students' progress in following the strategy steps. Facilitate students' success in using the strategies by prompting them to complete steps if they are omitted or by providing assistance in completing strategy steps accurately. It may be necessary to reexplain or model some of the more difficult aspects of the strategies, based on student need. 6. Independent practice and mastery. After determining that the students know and understand the steps of the strategy, each student practices using the target strategy and self-statements without help. Continue to give guidance, reinforcement, and feedback. Gradually fade assistance until each student is capable of using the strategy without any help. 7. Generalization. Discuss with students throughout the week whenever situations arise where it is appropriate for students to apply the strategies. In addition, during collaborative and independent practice sessions, provide students with different types of materials (e.g., lookbacks are useful with narratives, expository text such as science book chapters, and learning rules to play a game) so that students learn to use the strategies flexibly. ^

Figure 1.

Self-regiilated strategy development model for teaching strategies. VOL. 33. No. 4. MARCH 199B 211

strategy teachers expect them to use. To help students master and generalize use of a given strategy, teachers should show students how to monitor and keep track of their progress. It is also important to begin strategy instruction by teaching just one or two strategies at a rime. New strategies are introduced only when earlier ones are well established. Also, as with strategy instruction in any content area, mastery takes time, and students are not likely to improve their performance after one or two lessons. The strategies described in this article may take up to several days of practice before students can use them independently. It should also be recalled that strategies do not need to be taught as a separate part of the curriculum and that simply instructing students how to use strategic reading behaviors should not be a goal in and of itself. Rather, they should be taught in context, when and where reading comprehension is necessary. Several strategies are described in this article, all of which have empirical support for being effective in improving students' reading comprehension. Although some of the comprehension research has been conducted with students not identified as having learning and reading disabilities, these strategies nonetheless provide a range of activities appropriate for many comprehension skills required by students at different grade levels. Further, the SRSD model for teaching strategies is especially useful, given that it has been proved to be successful for teaching strategies to students with and without learning disabilities in several academic content areas, including writing (Danoff, Harris, & Graham, 1993, De La Paz & Graham, 1997) and mathematics (Case, Harris, & Graham, 1992).

rize information found in single paragraphs. Bean and Steenwyk (1984) found this strategy to be effective in increasing reading comprehension with general education sixth graders who read isolated expository paragraphs. A similar approach was used as part of a multicomponent, peer-mediated instructional package developed by Simmons, Fuchs, Fuchs, Hodge, and Mathes (1994) in which students with low achievement, average achievement, and learning disabilities in Grades 2 through 5 created gist summaries of main ideas in single paragraphs. H o w TO TEACH. To teach students to create a gist of what they are summarizing, show them how to restate important information using a minimum number of words. This can be done by starting with a single expository sentence, rather than a paragraph, and requiring students to retell the main idea. After students are successful, two sentences of text are retold, in 15 words or fewer. This procedure is gradually expanded until students are able to summarize an entire paragraph in 15 words or fewer. Guidance and feedback are necessary so that students become skilled in retelling only the most important information. When reviewing students' current performance level, goal setting may be especially useful to help motivate students (see Note). They can set goals (for example, to limit the number of words when attempting to create a summary or to include content from a specific number of sentences in one main idea statement), monitor their progress, and then set increasingly ambitious goals as they become more proficient in creating gist summaries. Rule-Governed Summaries

SUMMARIZING EXPOSITORY T E X T Beginning in upper elementary school, students must use their reading (i.e., decoding and comprehension) skills in classes such as science and social studies to learn new information. After reading a text, whether narrative or expository, students are frequently expected to recall main ideas and concepts from the assigned passage and to provide support for their decisions. To do this, they must process the content and determine which ideas are important. Researchers have found that teaching students in regular education classrooms how to summarize expository text after reading has resulted in improved comprehension and memory of the information (e.g., Bean & Steenwyk, 1984; Rinehart, Stahl, & Erickson, 1986; Taylor & Beach, 1984). Many summarization strategies can be taught, including gist, rule-governed summaries, and hierarchical summaries. Gist Summaries RATIONALE AND DESCRIPTION.

Gist summaries are

those in which students use single sentences to summa212

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Rule-governed summaries are created by following an established set of rules. The reader is guided through a process of eliminating information that is not essential and reworking the remainder into a condensed format. In their 1984 investigation on the use of gist summaries, Bean and Steenwyk also examined the use of rule-governed summaries for single paragraphs of expository text with general education sixth-grade students. Their results indicated that rule-governed summaries were even more beneficial than gist summaries for the participating students. Rinehart et al. (1986) used a similar set of rules to teach students at the same grade level how to summarize multiple paragraphs of expository text. The work of Bean and Steenwyk (1984) and Rinehart et al. (1986) suggests that the most useful rules are (a) delete trivial information, (b) delete important but redundant information, (c) compose a word to replace either a list or individual components of an action, (d) select or create a topic sentence, and (e) relate the important supporting information. Once the students are able to effectively use rules to summarize single paraRATIONALE AND DESCRIPTION.

graphs, they are ready to learn to summarize multiple paragraphs and extended passages. Additional rules are to (a) create summaries of each paragraph, (b) write a summary of the paragraph summaries, and (c) use the previous summarization rules on this synopsis. HOW TO TEACH. Because this strategy depends on a set of rules, students must understand and learn what those rules are prior to summarizing text. Thus, activating students' background knowledge is important when teaching the rule-governed summarization strategy. In other words, the teacher must begin by defining what is meant by the terms "important information," "trivial or redundant information," and "topic sentences." The teacher must also demonstrate how to generate acronyms (such as HOMES to represent the names of each of the Great Lakes). Students will need several opportunities to practice following these directions before they are able to demonstrate competence in creating rule-governed summaries, and they will need guidance and feedback during collaborative and independent practice about their performance as they attempt to create their summaries. In addition, to illustrate how comprehension strategies can be combined into more complex instructional routines, students can be taught to turn each summarization rule into a question as they complete each step (e.g., "Did I delete trivial information?"), thus incorporating a self-questioning procedure (to be discussed in more detail later in this article) to self-monitor use of the rule-governed summarization strategy. Hierarchical Summaries RATIONALE AND DESCRIPTION.

The basic premise

underlying hierarchical summaries is that good readers notice and make use of the way ideas are organized in textbooks to help them form a macrostructure, or mental organization, of the important information that needs to be remembered (Taylor, 1982). Hierarchical summaries make use of text structure inherent in most expository texts, using chapter, section, and subsection headings found in each chapter. To use this strategy, students are taught to skim the first few pages of the chapter or passage, paying close attention to the headings. They then carefully read each subsection of the passage and create an outline of the entire passage consisting of an overall heading, main idea statements from each subsection, and supporting information and topic headings. Taylor and Beach (1984) taught seventh-grade students in general education classes to create hierarchical summaries when reading several pages of a social studies text, and they found that this strategy effectively improved students' comprehension of unfamiliar material. H o w TO TEACH. Students first skim the entire reading selection, carefully noting headings and subheadings.

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Step 3 Key idea for entire passage

I ^ Step 2 Topic heading {with lines connecting simitar topics

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Stepl (for the first subsection) Main idea sentence Supporting detail sentence Supporting detail sentence

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Repeat Step 1 (for each subsection) Main idea sentence Supporting detail sentence Supporting detail sentence

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Step 2 Topic heading

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Repeat Step 1 (for each subsection) Main idea sentence Supporting detail sentence Supporting detail sentence

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Figure 2. Steps to creating a hierarchical summary (based on data from llairis & Graham, 1992, 1996).

Then they are to create an outline of their summary on lined paper, using a specific format (see Figure 2). This format requires (a) space at the top of the page for the major heading, (b) capital letters spaced down the page for each subsection of text designated by a heading, and (c) space provided in the left margin to write topic headings and draw lines that connect related subsections. Figure 2 illustrates the steps for creating a hierarchical summary. After creating their skeletal outline, students reread each subsection of the passage. They first select two to three words from the subsection heading that reflect the topic of the subsection and use these words to create a sentence that reflects the most important idea about that topic. Then, under the main idea sentence, students write two or three sentences that contain details about the topic and are important to remember. This procedure is repeated for each subsection of the passage. Second, after writing a main idea and two to three supporting detail sentences for each subsection, students generate topic headings, relating similar topics whenever possible. Third, in their own words, students create a key idea for the entire passage that serves as the major heading. To illustrate how a hierarchical summary might look, Figure 3 shows a completed hierarchical summary for a seventh-grade social studies textbook selection on India. When first presenting this strategy to students, describe the strategy using graphic organizers and examples such as those in Figures 2 and 3. Teachers may wish to tell students that one reason why they are learning the hierarchical summarization strategy is that after VOL. 33. No. 4. MARCH 1998 213

India has a varied landscape and climate. A. Much of India's border is coastline. The Arabian Sea is to the west. The Indian Ocean is to the south. To the east is the Bay of Bengal.

Landforms

B. The Ganges River is an important Indian River. The Ganges begins in the Himalayan Mountains, runs through the Ganges Plain, and empties Into the Bay of Bengal. The Ganges is very important to the religious life of many Indians. C. The Deccan Plateau is important for the economy. It Is located in the south. The Deccan Plateau has fertile farmland and forests. There are rich deposits of minerals there.

Climate.

' D. Most of India is warm or hot most of the year. The Himalayas block cold northern air from coming into India. *> E. The monsoons are essential for water. The monsoons are seasonal winds. During the rainy season they bring moist air from the Indian Ocean. People depend upon the monsoons for water to live and farm with.

Figure 3. An example of a hierarchical summary for a social studies textbook selection on India.

learning this strategy, students in sixth and seventh grade were better able to summarize material, and that this skill in turn helped them remember more information they had read than students who didn't learn this strategy. This description also suggests to students what the strategy accomplishes, and it suggests when and where it may be useful. Further discussion about the usefulness of the hierarchical summarization strategy should focus on tasks and situations relevant to a specific group of students. It is also important for teachers to plan how to teach students to generalize what they have learned with any of the summarization strategies presented in this section. To begin this process, teachers should provide students with a wide variety of reading materials and discuss different situations in which the various strategies can be used to help enhance comprehension.

COMPREHENDING STORY STRUCTURE Anthropologic studies have demonstrated that when people retell stories that they have read or heard, these retellings, across many cultures, share certain similarities (Gurney, Gersten, Dimino, & Carnine, 1990). Generally, narratives written in Western cultures include some reference to setting (telling who characters are, and where and when the story occurs) and an initiating event, or problem or goal that the main character must face at the beginning of the story. Subsequently, the 214

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character makes an attempt, or series of actions, to solve the problem or reach the goal. Eventually some sort of resolution, or end to the story, happens. Characters may also have reactions (internal or external) to the problem or resolution. Numerous researchers have used this story structure, often called story grammar, to help students organize, analyze, and remember the content of stories. Students are taught to recognize story structure to help them retell and to make inferences, characterizations, judgments, and predictions, as well as to determine the author's purpose in writing the story. Story Maps RATIONALE AND DESCRIPTION.

Researchers (e.g.,

Carnine & Kinder, 1985; Dimino, Gersten, Carnine, & Blake, 1990; Gurney et al., 1990; Johnson, Graham, & Harris, 1997; Short & Ryan, 1984) have consistently demonstrated the benefits of using story grammar to map narratives so that general and special education elementary and secondary students improve their reading comprehension. Story maps are graphic organizers with story elements used as headings on some kind of teachermade worksheet. These headings are used to prompt students to locate key information from the story, and, once located, to record it on the graphic organizer. Support for teaching students to use story mapping as a comprehension strategy comes from Baumann and Bergeron (1993) and Idol (1987), who demonstrated that first-, third-, and fourth-grade students with and without reading problems improved their comprehension following its use in general education classrooms. HOW TO TEACH. Prior to introducing this strategy to students, teachers must decide which story grammar elements (and which terminology) are most important for their students. They must also choose either to have students record story element information informally or to use a teacher-generated story map. Story elements may either be referred to as simple headings (e.g., "character") or phrased as questions (e.g., "Who is this story about?"). With respect to the SRSD model for teaching comprehension strategies, teachers must model how to locate story elements in text and write them down, whether on lined paper or on a story map. During the modeling session, teachers should include explicit selfinstruction statements such as, "As I read, I am finding and listing story elements so that I can understand what happens next," or, "If I can find the problem in the beginning of this story, I will understand why the character wants to do the next series of actions," to help students understand the purpose of and how to execute the strategy steps. During the independent practice and mastery phase of instruction, teachers should gradually fade out use of any graphic organizers or prompting so that students become independent in their use of the strategy.

SELF-QUESTIONING Teachers, through the use of questions, direct students to focus on pertinent information from readings and to monitor their comprehension. Alternatively, students can learn to ask themselves questions (which they must then answer) as a way to improve their own reading comprehension.

tions based on the particular story they are reading. Modeling and collaborative practice are necessary so that students learn how to create relevant questions, regardless of which self-questioning strategy they use. For example, after reading a passage, teachers not only create and answer a question, but also discuss why it is a good question. Self-Monitoring

Student-Generated Questioning Intervention researchers (e.g., Singer & Donlan, 1982; Wong & Jones, 1982) demonstrated that having students generate their own questions to answer improves reading comprehension. Moreover, in a meta-analysis of 68 studies designed to improve reading comprehension for students with learning disabilities, Mastropieri, Scruggs, Bakken, and Whedon (1996) found that interventions including some type of self-questioning resulted in greater improvement than instructional approaches that did not include selfquestioning. Student-generated questioning may take different forms. For example, students can develop questions about aspects of text they believe are most important. In addition, students can ask themselves questions to monitor their comprehension while they read. By creating questions about a reading passage and answering them, students not only focus on important information, but also remember it better. RATIONALE AND DESCRIPTION.

HOW TO TEACH. Students need to learn that good questions focus directly on important elements of text. For example, students can be taught to follow Wong and Jones's (1982) strategy to make up questions about the main idea in reading passages. The strategy is to (a) ask yourself what you are studying this passage for, (b) find the main idea(s) in the paragraph and underline it/them, (c) think of a question about the main idea you have underlined and remember what a good question should be like, (d) learn the answer to your question, and (e) always look back at your questions and answers to see how each successive question and answer provide you with more information. As an alternative, when reading narratives, students can be taught to use Singer and Donlan's (1982) strategy, which incorporates self-questioning with story grammar elements. In this approach, students answer a general story grammar question for each element included in the story. Examples of general questions are as follows: (a) Who is the leading character? (b) What is the leading character trying to accomplish? (c) What obstacles does the leading character encounter? (d) Does the leading character reach his or her goal? (e) Why did the author write this story? and (f) What does the author want to show us about life? Using the general questions as models, students create and answer their own specific ques-

RATIONALE AND DESCRIPTION.

Students can

use

questions to ask themselves what they are doing, to help them follow the steps of a strategy, or to make sure certain steps were completed correctly. Taylor, Harris, Pearson, and Garcia (1995) cited the work of Gaetz in their text on teaching reading, in which a questionanswering checklist was used to help average and belowaverage fourth-, fifth-, and sixth-grade readers answer questions correctly. The students were taught to ask themselves the following questions: (a) Did I answer all parts of the question? (b) Did I read the question correctly? (c) Did I say enough to answer the question so someone else will understand? (d) Did I get ideas from the text and from my memory so the answer makes sense? and (e) Did I answer all of the questions? If not, why? Chan (1991) devised a different type of list of questions for students with learning disabilities in Grades 5 and 6 to ask themselves when they created summaries: 1. For deleting redundant information: (a) Does this sentence repeat what has already been said? (b) Shall I leave it out? and (c) What is the paragraph mainly about? 2. For deleting trivial information: (a) Does this sentence tell us anything new or more important? (b) Shall I leave it out? and (c) What is the paragraph mainly about? 3. For locating topic sentences: (a) What does the paragraph seem to be about? (b) Does this sentence tell us anything new or more important than the main idea? (c) Is my guess right? (d) Which sentence gives the main idea? and (e) Which answer gives the main idea of the passage? 4. For identifying implicit main ideas: (a) What does the paragraph seem to be about? (b) Does this sentence just tell me more about the main idea? (c) Which answer gives the main idea? (d) Which answer gives the main idea of the passage? H o w TO TEACH. Self-monitoring checklists can be developed for almost any comprehension activity students complete independently. The teacher must try to anticipate whether students will benefit from questions that help them understand and execute a given strategy correctly or from a list of questions that will help them internalize a given series of strategy steps. While teachVoi. 33, No. 4, MARCH 1908 215

ing students to self-monitor, teachers should review with students how to ask and answer questions and how to perform the needed actions. TEXT LOOKBACKS A N D QUESTION-ANSWER RELATIONSHIPS Whether reading expository or narrative material, students frequendy are asked to locate specific information or to answer questions about major or minor points in text. Lookbacks and question-answer relationships are two strategies to assist students with finding relevant information from texts. Text Lookbacks Garner and her colleagues observed that poor readers do not spontaneously "lookback" to locate information (Garner, 1982; Garner, Hare, Alexander, Haynes, & Winograd, 1984; Garner & Reis, 1981). Even when told they could look back to find answers to questions, many students thought that it was "illegal" to do so and needed teacher confirmation that this was allowed (Garner et al., 1984). Based on this finding, Garner and colleagues (Garner, 1982; Garner et al., 1984; Garner & Reis, 1981) conducted a series of studies including both poor and good readers from 4th through 10th grade to evaluate the effects of teaching students lookback strategies. Not only did student performance on comprehension measures improve in response to instruction, but also their increased performance was maintained long after their initial lookback training.

Pyrenees separate France from Spain. So, my answer to the question is the Pyrenees. As students work, the teacher should prompt them to look back and provide several opportunities for practice and feedback. Collaborative and independent practice should begin with short reading selections and progress to longer passages. Generalization may be encouraged by providing students with a variety of different types of materials to be read (such as science textbooks or driving manuals) and by eliciting suggestions from students regarding other opportunities during the day when lookbacks may be useful. Because some questions require students to reflect on their prior knowledge rather than locate information directly in the text, it may be useful to teach students about the question-answer relationships strategy as well.

RATIONALE AND DESCRIPTION.

H o w TO TEACH. Teachers first show students how to look back in different texts to locate specific information. It is helpful to model skimming the text to find the most likely section where the necessary information is located and then to read carefully to identify the correct answer. The teacher might say, for example, The question is asking us which mountains separate FrancefromSpain. I don\ remember, so Vll look back in the chapter until 1 find it. First, Vll skim over the chapter until I come to the section where I think III find the answer. The first section of chapter is about the history of France, so the answer wouldn V be there. The second section talks about the people and culture, so that answer wouldn V be there. The next section is about the landscape. I think that the answer will be here somewhere, so Vll start to look a little more carefully. The first part talks about rivers, so Vm not going to worry about that. The next part talks about mountains. This is where the answer probably will be, so I will read this paragraph carefully. Here we go, it says that in the southwest, the 216

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Question-Answer Relationships RATIONALE AND DESCRIPTION.

Students often rely

excessively on either background knowledge or text information when asked to read and answer questions (Raphael, 1984), despite the fact that not all answers come from text. In contrast, according to Pearson and Johnson (1978), answers for questions can be text explicit (in which the answer is stated explicitly in the text), text implicit (in which the answer is inferred from the text, using information across sentences or paragraphs), and script implicit (in which information comes from the student's own knowledge base). Intervention researchers have generated various terms such as "right there," "think and search," and "on my own" (Raphael & Pearson, 1985; Raphael & Wonnacott, 1985) "here," "hidden," and "in my head" (L. Graham & Wong, 1993), or "in the book" and "in my head" (Raphael, 1986) to teach average and poor readers in fourth through sixth grade to answer literal and inferential questions. HOW TO TEACH. Students are first shown how to identify question-answer relationships and are then given opportunities to practice labeling questions according to those relationships. It is important for teachers to stress that both the question and the answer must be considered to come up with the appropriate label. Moreover, students must be taught to integrate knowledge from both texts and their prior knowledge when answering questions. To differentiate between "in the book" and "in my head" questions, for example, teachers can ask students some questions that have answers in the text and other questions that rely on the students' own experience. As students answer questions, teachers should help them determine how they knew the answers by asking where the answer was in the story or, if not, how they knew the answer. After students under-

stand these two question-answer relationships, instruction can be expanded to differentiate between different types of "in the book" and "in my head" relationships (Raphael, 1986). SUMMARY The purpose of this article was to show teachers how to teach students with learning and reading disabilities to comprehend the material they read. Researchers have consistently demonstrated that students with learning and reading problems can learn metacognitive comprehension strategies and that these strategies help students improve their understanding of text. Strategies reviewed in this article emphasize different aspects of reading comprehension: Some focus on the overall task, whereas others are more appropriate for helping students locate minor details. The strategies we reviewed do not address all (e.g., affective or evaluative) aspects of comprehension; nevertheless, we chose these strategies because their effectiveness has been well documented with students with regular or special educational needs. Although sometimes time-consuming for teachers and students to learn initially, students can learn to use strategies independently and thus become equipped to comprehend what they read in a variety of teacherdirected and self-selected situations. Many strategies may be combined (for example, students may create a rule-based summary of a passage, lookback to find missing information, and ask themselves questions to monitor their summarization). Finally, when teaching students to use one or more of these strategies, we recommend that teachers follow the SRSD model principles to teach strategies to students.

A B O U T THE AUTHORS Philip N. Swanson, MA, is a doctoral student in special education at Peabody College of Vanderbilt University. He worked for 10 years teaching children with special educational needs from preschool to high school. Swanson's current interests include teaching metacognitive strategies to students with mild to moderate disabilities and teacher preparation. Susan De La Paz, PhD, is an assistant professor of special education at Peabody College of Vanderbilt University. She currently conducts intervention research in the area of writing for elementary and middle school students with learning disabilities. Address: Susan De La Paz, Department of Special Education, Peabody College of Vanderbilt University, Nashville, T X 37203; e-mail: [email protected]

NOTE Bold text is used throughout this article to highlight suggestions for incorporating elements from the SRSD model into teaching comprehension strategies.

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