What can teachers do to improve students’ comprehension of content-area text?
Page 10: Introduction to Anticipation-Reaction Guide
One strategy teachers can use to help students document textual evidence while acknowledging multiple perspectives is the Anticipation-Reaction Guide. The Anticipation-Reaction Guide template provides an organizational structure that guides students as they read and analyze the text passage. Teachers can use this guide to:
- Activate students’ background knowledge before reading
- Help them identify textual evidence during reading
- Help them to evaluate their own and one or more author’s perspectives after reading
To prepare the guide, the teacher reviews the curricular materials and identifies key concepts or themes. The teacher then writes down 3–5 anticipatory statements about those overarching principles or themes. Though it can be helpful to focus on somewhat controversial topics, teachers should take care to avoid topics that are particularly politically or emotionally charged within the school or community. Learning about respectful disagreement is productive both for the lesson and for students’ personal growth, but topics to which students have already been exposed to unhealthy disagreement will serve only to distract from the real goal of evaluating textual evidence. Content that does not allow for alternative or competing perspectives is not appropriate for inclusion in an Anticipation-Reaction Guide.
Because true-false statements limit the students’ reading comprehension to the identification of isolated facts, statements included in the Anticipation-Reaction Guide should be phrased as opinions, which have a greater chance to foster the consideration of multiple perspectives. Statements that lack one right answer can lead individuals to cite different kinds of information in either agreement or disagreement. For this reason, the guides are sometimes referred to as opinionnaires. These statements are placed in the first column of the Anticipation-Reaction Guide.
Ms. Forrester, the science teacher from the Challenge video, has prepared a set of statements based on a text passage on tropical rainforests, as shown in the Anticipation-Reaction Guide below.
Text Passage on Tropical Rainforests
Note: The chapter summary below is included here for illustrative purposes. Of course, an actual textbook chapter would be much longer and more detailed but also impractical for inclusion in this resource.
Chapter Summary: What Is a Tropical Rainforest?
A tropical rainforest is a type of ecosystem—a place where living organisms depend on one another and their environment for survival—characterized by dense vegetation and a spectacular diversity of animal life. As their name suggests, though, rainforests are perhaps best known for the amount of annual rainfall they receive. Some rainforests have been known to get nearly 400 inches of rainfall in a single year. For the sake of comparison, the wettest regions of the United States receive an average of 30 inches over the same period of time.
Rainforests occur in locations near the equator—places like Peru, the Congo, and Indonesia—where the weather stays warm most of the year and where it never gets cold. The average temperature in most rainforests is around 80 degrees Fahrenheit. For this reason, rainforests are home to incredibly varied populations of plant and animal life. Half of all animals on our planet live in rainforests, as does nearly two-thirds of all plant life.
This density of vegetation is why rainforests produce nearly 40% of all the oxygen on Earth, despite covering only 6% of the terrestrial surface. Rainforests are so full of life that there may yet be untold numbers of plant and animal species living within them that have never been discovered by humans.
Such diversity has also made rainforests a target for exploitation. People have clear-cut rainforests for their timber and to create farmable land for agriculture, mined them for their mineral wealth, and even damaged them by allowing tourists to visit in large numbers. Because rainforests help to control global temperatures by turning carbon dioxide into oxygen, the challenge of understanding them—and of protecting them—becomes more and more important with each passing year.
(Close this panel)
| Statement |  |
 |
Reader’s Perspective Before Reading | Textual Evidence and Source/Page # | Reader’s Perspective After Reading |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1. It is regrettable that animals lose their homes when we cut down trees to mine natural resources. However, it is more important that we obtain those natural resources to make the things we want and need to live. | |||||
| 2. It is better to eat food that is grown close to your town than to buy bananas grown in South America. | |||||
| 3. Because renewable resources like food, sunlight, and water will replenish themselves, we can use as much as we want. | |||||
| 4. All paper products negatively affect the environment. | |||||
Click here for a blank Anticipation-Reaction Guide template (Word format).
Click here for a blank Anticipation-Reaction Guide template (PDF format).
Students use the guide as they work through three steps:
- Before reading: Identify personal perspectives about the statements.
- During reading: Read, document textual evidence, and consider multiple perspectives.
- After reading: Consider whether the textual evidence warrants modifying or qualifying one’s perspective.
Each of these steps will be discussed in more detail in the following pages.
