Chapter 10 Review

1) The use of authentic assessment represents an effort to change assessment  from a negative event, in which knowledge and people are measured, to a positive process, by which knowledge is applied and people are valued.

2) Effective educational practices do not begin with assessment. Instead, they begin with instructional commitment to student learning. Authentic assessment has a lot of real world connections and are viewed in more of a observable presentation.

3) In an authentic assessment the classroom conversations must center around student work and to assess what has actually been learned. There has to be a variety of levels they must communicate between and they include: public, parents, other educators, teachers, and the students.

1) I think oral presentations of mastery are a great idea to implement in the classroom. Not only are they able to demonstrate what they've learned, but they are also learning other skills like crowd engagement, proper etiquette,  speaking skills, body language, etc. This goes back to kind of authentic assessment, it's not just about the content.
2) The code sheet seems like an interesting thing to possibly try in order to save time on grading papers, that way you can spend more time planning. I would have to do some test runs before I became a believer but I do like the concept enough to want to try it.

1) Is there any particular type of assessment we should focus on more than another? I know they are all important but are there any that stand out amongst the rest that are most effective and show the most growth, etc.?

Chapter 9 Review

1) Two strategies that help guide students in mentally sorting what is important and needed from what is background are coding text and underlining or highlighting. Text coding helps the student become more involved in their reading, make decisions as they read, and clarify their understanding. 
2) The book gave an idea of when students can't write or underline in a text book to use a separate sheet of paper in order to use the coding symbols found on pg. 173. Some teachers use stick notes in order to mark the passages in the text. 
3) The purpose of study strategies is to help foster independent learning. Content teachers have the academic knowledge to identify important concepts that need to be learned and they help develop the background information needed to show students the connection between things. 




1) Transparencies are a great way to allow students to reinforce the activities of highlighting and underlining. It allows the students to practice without writing in their books since most can't anyway. The activity can be both an individual or cooperative lesson. The students can even turn this into a presentation format to present to the class if they were assigned a particular chapter or something. 
2) I would like to implement  student-generated elaborations. These allow the students to create the study materials and they are more engaged with the process and the material they are trying to learn.  The students need the engagement in order to comprehend and remember the information they are trying to learn. There are a variety of forms that can be used. 


1) Study strategies are very important to possess. Many times we go through school without any and become more focused on how to study rather than what to study. What are some ways we can get middle school students more prepared for high school or high school students more readily prepared for college? How can we implement this in our schools?

Chapter 8 review

1) Reciprocal teaching is a strategy for building reading comprehension  that capitalizes on a reading apprenticeship model for learning. Teachers and students take turns talking to one another about the meaning of the text. It allows the teacher to model.
2) They believe we should focus on the process of comprehension and move toward independent learning. The goal should be that we improve the students' abilities to comprehend the text without the teacher's assistance. We should want them to use strategies on their own without being told.
3) Teachers can help improve the chances that students will increase their comprehension during silent reading by providing materials that are optimally difficult and opportunities for choice of materials and time for students to share their responses to reading with friends and adults. (150)

1) Questioning the author seems like a great strategy to implement because it helps students cope with challenging content materials. They have to think about what the author is saying rather than the text. Many times the student looks at textbooks like they have been anonymously written rather than being the work of authors. I think this strategy helps students look at the information in a different way.
2) Another idea I would like to implement is the textbook activity guide. This will help involve the student in a cooperative way. It is an activity that requires just a short amount of time and just helps the students become involved in the text they are reading. The students get to help monitor their own comprehension and the teachers role is to just help the students become independent learners.


1) What are some ways we can help students remember the strategies to use when reading the text? With the exception of a bookmark?

Chapter 7 Review

1) Pre reading strategies are actually very beneficial to students when they are going to be learning  a large amount of information like from science or social studies. The pre reading strategies help students to organize the information before beginning what they are studying. There are a variety of pre-reading graphic organizers. 

2) Researchers who investigate effective strategies to help correct misconceptions have generally concluded that teacher-mediated discussions work the best.  

3) 3 ways schema can be modified- 1. add new information without really changing their ideas about anything 2. readers "tune" their previous understandings by altering what they formerly believed so that it is now consistent with their new learning 3. readers might restructure their beliefs totally and replace their existing ideas with new schema. 

1) Visual Prediction Guide- One of the strategies I would like to implement would be a visual prediction guide. Many learners are now visual learners and it is in large part due to technology. We constantly need to accommodate to those in our classroom. Visual Predication Guides  can be modified to fit the individual students needs. 

2) Anticipation Guides are also very helpful when trying to get students to build a connection. Anticipation guides highlight mismatches between what students may know and believe and what is presented in the text. Anticipation guides can be used in any content area and help the reader become more successful. 

1) What are some extra strategies that can be used in order to get students prior knowledge started up so that the lesson can be taught more efficiently?

Chapter 6 Review

1) Vocabulary that students need for reading receives the most attention, people actually possess four vocabularies: listening, speaking, reading, and writing. The listening vocabulary is the earliest to develop and the largest.

2) Paribakht and Wesche proposed a five-point scale of word knowledge: 1) Never saw the word 2) heard it, but do not know what it means 3) recognize it in context as having something to do with….4)know it well 5) can use this word appropriately

3) Morphology involves gaining information about the meaning, pronunciation, and part of speech of new words from their prefixes, roots, and suffixes. It is clear that when students learn to chunk letters in a long word into meaningful morphemes this helps process new words.

1) Word Family trees would be a great tool to implement for vocabulary lessons. It is a lot better than making students just write down definitions. It helps the students actually learn the words and serves as a visual for students who are visual learners. 

2) Concept maps are something I would implement when teaching new content in the science class. It gives the opportunity for you to make connections with words as well with definitions. It gives the students a chance to connect things to examples as well 

1) Learning words and extending a students vocabulary can become very boring for the student. What re some activities to promote a fun and productive vocabulary experience? 

Chapter 5 Review

1)   Teaching students to use headings, titles, subheadings, graphic clues, and signal words when previewing text helps students to use text features to comprehend text.

2)   One way to help students to understand the structure of a story is to provide students with a story grammar before the reading. They have been developed to help students facilitate the identification of the predictable aspects of a story.

3)   Signal words is one way proficient readers use to understand text structure. These words signal relationships between words and ideas.

4)   60-80 percent of the items on state tests are informational so it is best that we teach them.

1)   Story Frames- I would implement story frames within the curriculum  since they help so much with cause and effect. The students could learn a lot of information just from filling out a story frame.  They help with cause/effect, problem/solution, compare/contrast, sequence order, and description patterns.

2)   Another graphic organizer I would use is a Problem and Solution that can be found on Pg. 82. The problem and solution map is a great strategy that not only can be used for reading problem or content areas within the classroom, but it can also be used with real life issues one may encounter.

1)   Teachers are responsible for evaluating and choosing textbooks that are the best for their students. What resources are available to help teachers more effectively choose textbooks that facilitate rather than impede student learning?

Chapter 4 Review

1) Despite an increase focus on early literacy programs in the past 10 years 38 percent of America's fourth graders and 29 percent of America's 8th graders were still reading below the basic level on the 2005 National Assessment of Educational progress tests. 

2) According to the U.S. Department of Education, roughly 80 percent of high school dropouts are poor readers

3) If reading strategies are implemented with content areas 90 percent of struggling readers can be helped significantly. We recognize the behaviors but with the age they are at we sometimes let them slide under the radar.

1) Implementing Interactive Reading Guides. This is an effective strategy that will help students learn information from the text at an independent reading level.

2) Making sure all reading lesson plans have before, during, and after activities. This will help with schemata and review to make sure the student understands the content. The during activities will be helping the student retain more information.

1)   What can we do for those students who come from a minority/low income family overcome the barriers that are placed in front of them when it comes to literacy?