Excerpts from the article

1. ”What can you do if what you’re reading doesn’t make sense?’ I asked a girl I’ll call Hunter. “I don’t know,” was her reply. I have found that hunter’s reply is typical for struggling and nonstruggling readers, but typical makes it no less frustration. P. 133
2.  I provided here one method for dealing with student’s comprehension breakdowns by proposing a comprehension checklist.  P. 133
3. The comprehension checklist offers teachers and tutors a concrete way to help student’s become aware of comprehension strategies and monitor their own progress, and it includes strategies that are different form those used by a teacher to guide understanding of complex stories.  P. 135

Comments regarding these excerpts

1. There are plenty of strategies for decoding unknown words in text.  However, there is a lack of strategies for students who have comprehension difficulties, especially for transitional and older elementary students.
2. This checklist is designed to provide struggling students a starting point to help themselves better understand or comprehend the text. This checklist lists multiple student-directed strategies and serves as an ideas list for teachers.  It is divided into prereading comprehension strategies, during-reading strategies, and post reading comprehension strategies. 
3. To assure success the checklist must be individualized for each student.  The step-by –step implementation:
   1. Assess the student’s strengths and weakness through informal reading inventories and interest surveys.
   2. Begin a personalized checklist, listing the strengths of the student first.
   3. Identify one to two new comprehension strategies that are within the student’s reading abilities and needs.
   4. Model the new strategy several times, and then allow the student’s to participate in the strategy use with you.
   5. Allow the students to read a passage independently.  Students then check off the strategies that they used form their new checklist.  This passage should be one that is at an instructional level for the students and will allow them to use the old and new strategies.
   6. Discuss using the checklist as a guide.   Allow students to think about other strategies they used to understand the passage and might wish to add to their checklist.