I chose to complete my action research on close reading strategies to assist students with reading comprehension and hopefully higher achievement on their AP english and AP US history courses that they are enrolled in this semester.
The students have received instruction in marking the text to do the following with their comprehension: summarize, clarify, question, respond, visualize and connect. After the initial instruction of the strategies were complete, I gave them a reading and respond assignment with the instructions of "use what strategies you feel are most useful to you". They reflected, and in short order I discovered that they did not utilize visualize, connect and respond as much as I had hoped.
I wondered if it was the nature of the text, as these were English essays that I was using to assess. Maybe it would be easier to utilize science text? This is definitely the platform for the visualizing component. It makes learning science content so much easier if the words can be converted into images.
I decided to forgo the original plan of teaching the strategy 'rereading' for another attempt to answer this question with a different type of text.
I copied a chapter from the college level chemistry text and gave them two focuses to be reading for with the explicit instruction to use the strategies that were least used during the prior assessment.
The students utilized the strategies requested, and reflected on the responses. I have not evaluated the responses thoroughly as of yet.
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