Getting Ready to Read: Guided Probing for Poor Comprehenders

Abstract

An advance organizer, TELLS Fact or Fiction, was used to orient students to stories prior to reading them. The steps represented by the acronym were: (T) study story titles, (E) examine and skim pages for clues as to what stories were about, (L) look for important words, (L) look for hard words, (S) think about the story settings, and (Fact or Fiction) decide whether stories were factual or fictional. Teachers used the probing technique to guide 4 LD elementary students and 2 secondary students from general special education classes. Analysis of performance on comprehension questions showed that, in general, students' average performance on factual, sequential, and inferential questions improved when they used the technique. The two older students maintained acceptable performance on inferential questions when the technique was removed; the remainder of the subjects were unable to maintain their improved performance after teacher-guided assistance was removed.