Comprehension Guides for Older Readers

Last month, I reviewed anticipation guides and the role they can play in supporting reading comprehension for students before reading.  This month, I'd like to review another type of reading strategy lesson, the Three Level Comprehension Guide, that also supports students as they read informational text, but attempts to give them an active role in constructing meaning at three different levels.   The three levels include the literal, the interpretive and the applied levels of comprehension.

Most teachers of reading are well aware of these three levels of comprehension and use them to guide their own construction of questions for students.  However, the most successful teachers go the next step and provide instruction that defines each level for students and teaches them how to locate and respond at all three levels of comprehension.  The terms literal, interpretive and applied are used often in instruction and students are taught the hierarchy in which they sit.  The authors of a learning skills study sheet from Cuesta College in Northern California do a nice job of summarizing the three levels of comprehension.   Simply put, they state that literal means "what is actually stated"; interpretive means "what is implied by the text, and applied means "taking what was said (literal) and then what was meant by what was said (interpretive) and then extending (apply) the concepts or ideas beyond the situation."

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What is a Three Level Comprehension Guide?

The three level guide provides teachers with an instructional format for facilitating this type of learning and responding before, during and after reading. The guide presents students with a list of declarative statements at each level before they read.  This alerts readers to potentially important ideas and supports their search for meaning.  As they read, students look for the ideas featured in the guide.  After reading, the guide can be used as a springboard for discussion in small groups, as students compare their reactions to the guide and look back through the text to support their decisions.

This type of guide puts an interesting spin on response activities for older readers because they are no longer just answering questions, but rather, they are reading statements (true or false) and being asked to agree or disagree with each statements, using examples to support their opinion or reasoning.  And finally, although the statements are separated in this learning guide for the sake of instruction, with regular use, students should begin to see the relationship between the three levels of understanding in their efforts to make sense of what they read.

The Curriculum and Instruction Branch of Saskatchewan Education in Canada has published an excellent document that outlines several examples of advanced organizers for