Supporting Comprehension of Texts
By: Kriti Khare
Tags: Computing Education, Scaffolding, Reading, Comprehension, Education

Supporting Comprehension of Texts

Strategies to support comprehension of an academic paper before, during and after reading

A text that I would like my students to read before they begin their formal education in Computing Science is a Task Force report by the Association of Computing Machinery, the world’s largest computing society that brings educators, researchers and professionals in computing together. This text is known as Computing as a discipline (Denning et al., 1989).

This is the report of a task force in 1989 when computing was a new field and scientists were trying to understand its multi-facet nature — how it combines concepts from science, engineering and math. This report will give students a balanced and rich view of computing as a discipline by looking at the different traditions behind it and its roots. Some students might relate to some perspectives more than others and, as a result, have multiple entry points into the rest of the course and the courses they take in future about computing.

Three strategies to support language comprehension of an academic text

Pre-reading: Paint me a Story

This might be the first time when they students have engaged in an academic paper and as a result, this activity inspired by Fields (2017) will take some of stress away from the paper itself, because students will have prior knowledge after this activity to work with. They will also be familiar with the type of language that is used in academic papers.

I will pull out 8–10 sentences (key ideas) from the reading. Students will be divided into groups and they will draw a picture representing the sentence given to their group as well as come up with an example to support the sentence or a question to explore further.

Students will display their drawings around the class or come up one by one to show their drawing. The other students will guess which sentence the image corresponded to.

As Fields (2017) explains, this activity uses multiple intelligence as learners engage in drawing, reading, speaking and reflecting. It highlights the key points in a reading, making the vocabulary that is important accessible.

During Reading: Mind map

A sample mind map

While reading the article, students will create a mind map that summarizes the ideas of the article (example of a mind map shown above). Mind mapping is a more visual form of note-taking because it is allows for relationships to be depicted (Buzan & Buzan, 1996). Students are able to pick out points that resonate with them and color-code according to the big ideas that they are finding in the readings. It gives the students a holistic view of the reading and seeing the connections between the subtopics. It is also easy to add more information as it comes up. Students can also go back to the mind map and change it at a later time as their understanding of the subject evolves.

Post-reading: Learning Log

Photo on VisualHunt.com

From their mind map, students will summarize what they learned in their Learning Log Journal and encourage them to use the vocabulary that they have to start using in the course. They also allow students to reflect upon the reading (Rochester Institute of Teaching, n.d.). I will give 4 questions for reflection: