Strategies to Help Students Connect With and Organize Information

 

A lot of the information students read is presented simply as large chunks of text. Other than chapter headings, there may be few visual cues to help them organize the information. And every time they look at these large chunks of text they have to start over trying to visually organize the information. The same holds true for large passages of auditory information.

 

Highlighting tools, comments, and other mark-up tools provide students a way to visually organize information, but they need specific mark-up strategies to help them analyze, organize, and integrate the information in a way that will always make sense to them when they look at it again the next day or the next week. Here are a variety of strategies. You and your student, or group of students, will need to decide which strategies will be used for the implementation activity. Be sure to add this information to the implementation form.

 

Text Mark-up Strategies - This first set of strategies include a range of cognitive complexity so students can pick a starting point for interacting with the text and then can increase the complexity of the information processing.

 

Relate to Senses - Mark text that relates to personal memories:

• I can taste . . .
• I can hear . . .
• I can visualize . . .

 

Relate to Self - Mark text that relates to personal memories:

• Past experience
• Books, pictures, videos
• Events, people, issues

 

Purpose - Mark text by words and phrases that point to the meaning of the text:

• Specific word occurrence
• Adjectives
• Sequence (e.g. timeline)
• Compare/contrast

 

Preview - Mark text by sections that have meaning. Examples include:

• Titles
• Sub-titles
• Repeated words
• First & last paragraph

 

ACID - Mark text by your interpretation of the meaning. This can lead to further analysis of the information. Examples include:

• Agree
• Confusing
• Interesting
• Disagree

 

Digging Deeper - Here are some strategies that you and your students can use to build upon some of the mark-up strategies listed above.

 

Predicting or Inferring - As students work through and visually organize the text they can start to predict or infer what the text is about, what the author is actually saying, or where the text is heading.

 

Questioning - As students work through the text they can start to record any questions. This works well with the ACID strategy. Vocabulary tools can be helpful if the student feels that a question may involve unfamiliar words and phrases.

 

Self-monitoring - Students can ask themselves how well they feel they understand the meaning of the text, making decisions on what areas they may need to target for further work.

 

Summarizing - Students start to identify main ideas, list key words or phrases, or restate the text in their own words.

 

Text that has been marked-up and visually organized can be an important tool to help students share what they understand from the text. Memory always benefits from some type of cue, and visual mark-up strategies can provide very effective supports for sharing what has been learned.

 

The strategies above came from the following sources:

• Active Reading Strategies - http://savvyknowledge.com/resources/education/active-reading-strategies/
• Super Six Comprehension Strategies - https://www.teachstarter.com/blog/what-are-the-super-six-comprehension-strategies/