Reading Comprehension - Social Studies

WikEd Project
Reading Comprehension - Social Studies
book      

My WikEd Project - For my WikEd project I set out to find how I could improve the reading comprehension in my students.  My wife recently finished her Master's Degree in Reading so she has been pushing me to help my students be better readers.  I took this as a challenge and started my research.  If I could change anything I would probably have made my project title How to teach reading in the Social Studies Curriculum.  I did most of my research on how to incorporate reading in social studies and did not do as much on its effectiveness and diversity.

Application in the Classroom

"Content area specialisits, whether they teach history, science, or geography, are all teachers of reading (Harvey and Goudvis 206)."

For this portion of my research I decided to look at ways I could help my students become better readers.  The more research I did the more I found out that giving the students a purpose to their reading helps them to stay more focused.  I feel the best way to do this is to give them graphic organizers to help them with their reading.  In this section of my project I made many links to different graphic organizers.  If an image of the graphic organizer wasn't available I gave a brief description.  I divided the graphic organizers into different categories by reading strategies: inferring, making connections, prior knowledge, imaging, questioning, determining importance, summarizing, synthesizing, and vocabulary.  One fantastic website I found was ReadingQuest - http://www.readingquest.org/strat/ .  It has wonderful graphic organizers and strategies that help students succeed in reading.

Evidence of Effectiveness

Evidence shows that teaching students different reading strategies allows them to be more successful readers.  It has been shown time and time again that content area teachers can not expect to give their students pages to read and expect them to be successful.  Students need to use reading strategies and graphic organizers so they see a purpose in reading.  For this portion of my project I wish I could have found more information on what content area teachers said about this topic.  When I started the project I felt that I would find a lot of teachers who were 'singing the praises' of content area reading instruction, but I did not. With all of the standardized testing I also thought I would find more statistical data on proof that teaching reading comprehension in social studies helped students be better readers.

I found several other resources that I feel were very helpful in helping me to understand Reading Comprehension in Social Studies.

Other resources showing the effectiveness of reading in the content area.

Critics and their Rationale

Another surprise I had during my research was the lack of criticism for teaching reading strategies in social studies.  Most of the criticism I saw dealt with the thought that my students should be reading to learn in my classroom and not learning to read.  The teachers that were critical of teaching reading strategies felt that it took away from their students content area learning.  My thought is that if the students don't have successful reading strategies then they won't learn much in the class anyway.

Alternative Explanations do to Diversity

I did not find many critics who thought teaching reading comprehension in social studies was a bad idea.  Most of the negative talk about this stemmed from teachers not having enough time to teach all of their content.  They felt that if they had to give up content time it was a bad idea.  I completely disagree with this.  I feel that learning to be better readers is probably more important than all of the content I have to teach.  If I need to give up some of my content to help them be better students I am all for it.