What should content-area teachers know about comprehension instruction?

Transcript: Cynthia Shanahan, PhD

Graphic organizers come in all kinds of shapes and sizes and for all different purposes. They can help in as many ways as there are graphic organizers. There are so many graphic organizers for teachers to choose, so they really need to take several things into account. First, their main questions should be what do they want their students to get out of whatever it is that they’re reading. Think about those outcomes and those goals and choose a graphic organizer that’s going to help students meet those goals. Then you have to pay attention to the text. Some graphic organizers work better for different kinds of information, and it depends on the information in the text. For instance, if it’s a science article or a science text, you’re going to be choosing among a number of graphic organizers that might be different than if you are having your students reading a history text or a mathematic text. You have to take into account the kind of information, even within those discipline areas. There are differences in the way that text organize the information, and you need to pay attention to that. For instance, in a social studies textbook you might have comparison-contrast going on if it tells you about one country then tells you about another country, and you want students to compare and contrast, that would lead you to a comparison and contrast organizer. If you want them to read several documents and to come up with an answer to a central question, that’s a different kind of graphic organizer than if you want them just to read one document and learn the information in the document. Finally, you have to look at the discipline area that’s the focus of the reading. And think about what kinds of questions are typical of that discipline. There are graphic organizers that are specific to English but you would never use in chemistry or history or mathematics. So you really have to think about what it is that you want your students to know, and that’s based upon the content area that you’re in.