All Info About Reading

Comprehension Strategies: Understanding Question Types

As students progress in school, the focus shifts from learning to read onto reading to learn.  Children are expected to make the jump from reading to get the words right to reading to gather in information.  In other words, comprehension takes the stage as the most important reading skill.  All of that practice sounding words out, memorizing sight words, and learning about syllables, prefixes and suffixes was supposed to be setting the stage for the time when your student would use those skills as tools to learn something else.  It’s a nice theory!

However, as any parent or teacher of a reluctant or disabled reader can tell you, there are many students who simply do not make the jump with the rest of their class.  These students get stuck in the academic mud and steadily fall further and further behind their peers.  They are slow to do homework assignments, answer review questions incorrectly, and cannot deal with story problems in math.  Written directions are a headache, and they would just as soon take off on the project blindly as read the directions to understand what they are supposed to do.  Even worse, most tests are now in written form, and students make mistakes on the tests because they simply do not understand and remember what they have read.

If you notice problems such as these with your student, perhaps it’s time to take a closer look at reading skills in general and comprehension strategies in particular.  The first step is to make sure that reading skills are as intact as you think they are.  A student should be able to read grade level material without hesitations or miscues.  A good rule of thumb is to have the student read a page of text out loud.  Count the number of words that are misread or even that are said slowly and hesitantly.  If there are more than five of these kinds of mistakes, then you’ll want to explore reading skills more closely with a teacher or qualified tutor.  Your child may be having a reading problem.  Kids are experts at hiding these, but they often exhibit symptoms of reading difficulties in the middle and upper grades of elementary school, just because of this change from learning to read over to reading to learn. 

If your child is reading smoothly and confidently on grade level text, and still has difficulty answering the questions or passing tests, he or she may need some practical strategies to improve comprehension.  Like many other reading skills, this one comes automatically and intuitively to some students.  Like many other reading skills, it also can be quite difficult for others.  Unfortunately, many school programs sort of assume that word recognition skills always lead to sound comprehension.  This simply may not be the case for your student.  Some more specific intervention may be required.

First, help your student understand that comprehension questions come in several flavors, if you will.  There are several main varieties of questions that they are likely to encounter.  The easiest is the rote detail question.  This is the type of question that can be answered directly from the text.  Often, these are the first questions on an assignment, simply because they are the easiest.  These are questions like <b> What color was the box?</B> and <b>In what year did the United States go to war with Spain?</b>  They often begin with words such as <b> what</b>, <b> when</b>, or <b>who</b>.  Pick these questions out of the bunch and look back into the text.  Have your child physically find the answers and maybe highlight them rather than trying to recall or take a guess.  The end result will be more right answers.

The second type of question is the vocabulary question.  These questions try to delve into the student’s understanding of words that are perhaps new or specific to the text.  Sometimes they are straightforward, such as <b>What is industrialization?</b>  Other times they are a bit more subtle: <b>Did Jefferson Davis favor secession or unity?</b> or <b>Name three characteristics of labor unions in the early 1900’s.</b>  Have your student find the bold-faced words in the text and make sure of their meanings.  Many of these will connect up with questions that are vocabulary based.

The third type of question is the inferential question.  This question asks the student to gather in two or more facts and then put them together to come up with a third, unstated fact.  It can be a tough thing to teach!  I like to give students an example: If I come in the front door and I’m soaking wet, what can you infer about the weather?  Point out that no one has to tell them that it’s raining outside; they simply figure it out from the clues given.  That is called making an inference, and some of the questions that seem really hard are inferential questions.  If the answer is not readily apparent in the text (as in the detail questions), then it is time to think inferentially.  What is the author or teacher trying to get the reader to figure out?

The fourth type of questions are higher order thinking questions.  The older your student gets, the more likely these are to show up on homework assignments and on tests.  These have answers in paragraphs and essays.  They use key words such as <b>compare, contrast, analyze, and prove.</b>  Teach your student to look for those and similar key words and to realize that the answer must be taken from groups of facts.  They must take a position, then use the facts to support their argument.

The final type of questions are at the very top of the hierarchy of difficulty.  These are the questions that require a student to take the knowledge gained from the reading, lecture or lab experience, and take it to a whole new level.  They will need to find a way to use the information out in the real world.  These questions often have words like <b>create, demonstrate, invent, and apply.</b>  In most cases, these are limited to high school and college level curriculum. 

Recognizing the different types of comprehension questions will help your student to understand what kind of answer is needed and where to begin looking for it.  Your student will need to practice, but will benefit from the exercise.  Homework and tests will become more clear, and the student will be better able to manage independently.

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