Rationale
My elementary school has approximately 400 students enrolled in pre-kindergarten through sixth grade. There are 19 sixth grade students in my classroom. In my classroom 4 of my 19 students have an IEP. Additionally one student has a 504 plan and another student is in the process of a SAT to determine eligibility for services. An area that I noticed my students struggling in was reading comprehension. While many student are able to apply the learned skills of a lesson to that days lesson they are struggling to dig deeper into a text and go beyond a text to infer meaning, synthesize, and analyze.
Both qualitative and quantitative data showed a need to focus on reading comprehension in my classroom. Ten out of 19 students in my classroom entered sixth grade below reading level. Roughly 21% of my students scored below grade level on our first quarter MAP data. Weekly selection tests show that on average six students score below a 75% on their reading comprehension. In addition to this data I had observed student behaviors that led me to believe there was a need to focus on reading comprehension. My students did not seem engaged during our whole group reading lessons. During small group guided reading students did not seem excited to work in group. I had also observed that when students complete their weekly selection test they did not seem to be applying the learned skills that we used during the week.
I believe that a strong ability to comprehend reading and analyze reading beyond a text is not only an important skill for sixth grade, but an important life skill. During upper elementary grades students are reading to learn, not learning to read as they initially do in elementary school. Due to this students must be able to not only understand text that they read for school but also to make connections and inferences about their text to gain a deeper understanding. In addition to being an important grade level skill, comprehending beyond a text allows students to be better informed readers later in life.
Full Literature Review
Thinking beyond the text involves students digging deeper into their reading, to go past direct information to infer, make connections, synthesize, and predict. All of these reading comprehension skills require students to provide evidence from the text with their own background knowledge interpret the author’s meaning. Students need strategies to help them better comprehend text that requires them to infer, synthesize, make connections and predict. Research shows that annotating with close reading, notice and note signposts, and text dependent targeted questioning are all instructional strategies that have improve students ability to comprehend literature as they think beyond the text author’s meaning.