Educators have identified three strategies that are most helpful for struggling students

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To help educators support K-12 students who are struggling with reading comprehension, the HEDCO Institute at the University of Oregon has developed a tip sheet offering the most effective strategies schools can implement.
“While any reading comprehension strategy can be helpful when used in isolation, using several effective strategies together can be even more effective,” said Elizabeth Day, a research assistant professor at the HEDCO Institute who helped write the report.
“But more strategies are not necessarily better, and with limited resources and time, educators need to know which strategies, or combinations of strategies, are most likely to improve students’ reading comprehension.”
Of the many reading strategies studied in this review, researchers found that the following three strategies, when used in combination, were most effective in supporting readers who struggle with comprehension:
Main Idea: Teaches students to integrate the main ideas of a text in a coherent way. Text Structure: Teaches students to features of texts such as descriptive sentences, expressing cause and effect, elements of compare and contrast, and presenting a problem and solution. Retelling: Teaches students to use cues such as first, next, and last to organize information and provide a personal representation of a text.
No single comprehension strategy was found to be the most important, but the study found that a combination of text topic, sentence structure, and retelling strategies provided the greatest benefits for students with reading comprehension problems.
Importantly, this review found that this combination was most effective when combined with a key scaffolding element: providing readers with background knowledge instruction. Background knowledge instruction can include vocabulary and content knowledge instruction.
Research shows that reading comprehension is critical to students’ short- and long-term outcomes, yet many students experience reading difficulties and have challenges with word recognition, comprehension, or both.
Reading comprehension involves the ability to process text and make sense of it, as well as the ability to integrate text information with what the reader already knows.
Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, students have struggled to maintain their reading proficiency. In 2022, 31% of eighth graders in the U.S. performed below basic reading proficiency on the National Assessment of Educational Progress. This is the highest percentage of students below basic reading proficiency since 1995.
The HEDCO Institute report is based on a Bayesian network meta-analysis by Peng Peng and colleagues published in the Review of Educational Research in 2023. The analysis included approximately 6,349 K-12 students, including those with learning disabilities (37% of participants).
More information: Comprehension strategies to help students with reading problems. hedcoinstitute.uoregon.edu/rep … s/reading-strategies
Provided by University of Oregon
Citation: Educators identify three strategies that will best help students who struggle with reading (September 18, 2024) Retrieved September 18, 2024 from https://phys.org/news/2024-09-strategies-struggling-readers.html
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