Foundations of Reading: Objective VII

68. A fifth-grade teacher gives students a "reading planner" for an informational text that they will be reading independently. The reading planner contains various activities, including prompting students to summarize certain passages, to explain relationships between concepts according to specific information in the text, and to determine the meaning of domain-specific words based on appositives or appositive phrases embedded in the text. This reading planner is likely to be most effective for achieving which of the following instructional purposes?

• developing students' ability to read the text evaluatively

• supporting students' development of prosodic reading skills

• encouraging students to read and interact closely with the text

• teaching students to adjust their reading rate based on text complexity

69. A second-grade class is studying a social studies unit focused on geography (e.g., bodies of water, landforms) and its effects on people. So far, the students have learned about lakes, oceans, and bays. As part of the unit, the teacher reads aloud an informational passage that explains why human settlements near rivers historically have succeeded and grown. The teacher pauses regularly to discuss the reading, using a range of text-based questions to prompt discussion and promote students' literal, inferential, and evaluative comprehension. Part of the text appears below.

Which of the following questions about this part of the text would most effectively target students' inferential comprehension?

• How does living near a river help people meet their most basic survival needs, and where can you find that information in the text?

• Can you identify the reason why industry benefited from being near moving water?

• Do you think living near a river makes life easier or more difficult for people, and what information in the text makes you think so?

• Why are rivers beneficial for activities like growing crops and grazing animals?

70. A sixth-grade teacher gives students several essays that present contrasting opinions on a current social issue. The teacher then asks students to consider the following questions as they read the texts.

1. What is the author's opinion on the issue?

2. How might the author's background influence the opinion?

3. What evidence does the author use to support the opinion?

These questions support students' reading comprehension primarily by prompting them to:

• monitor comprehension of informational texts.

• identify the theme in expository texts.

• draw inferences from informational texts.

• analyze points of view in expository texts.

71. A sixth-grade teacher is planning an instructional unit on summarizing informational text. In one lesson, the teacher will show students how to use the graphic organizer shown below to support them in identifying important ideas from an informational passage.

Which of the following learning goals would be most essential for the teacher to address in the lesson to develop students' ability to compose an effective summary from these kinds of notes?

• citing evidence from the passage using direct quotes and paraphrasing

• developing a personal response to and interpretation of the passage

• noting unanswered questions that are raised in the passage

• analyzing the author's stylistic choices in the passage

72. A second-grade teacher frequently reads aloud informational books related to grade-level content in social studies, science, and the arts. The teacher supports students in developing their own questions during and after the read-alouds and then helps them conduct research on their questions using grade-level resources the teacher has collected on these topics. In keeping with evidence-based best practices, providing direct instruction in which of the following aspects of informational text would be most essential to students' success and growing independence in using informational texts for personal research?

• using text features to locate specific information in a text

• presenting information gained from a text in charts and tables

• using an outline to organize collected information in a logical format

• distinguishing between implied and explicitly stated information in a text

73. During a series of integrated science and literacy lessons, a third-grade teacher plans to have students read several articles from a children's magazine about new technologies for cleaning up pollution in the oceans. After they read the articles, students will work in small groups to create a graphic organizer comparing and contrasting two of the solutions. To prepare students to integrate information across texts in this activity, which of the following steps would be most essential for the teacher to take?

• providing a brief history of the environmental movement in the United States

• providing explicit instruction in how to identify the most important points and key details presented in the texts

• providing students with opportunities to share their personal responses to the articles

• providing explicit instruction in discipline-specific conventions of scientific writing (e.g., use of passive voice, quantitative data)

74. A third-grade teacher periodically reads aloud from a chapter in content-area textbooks using think-aloud while reading. Following is an example.

The teacher's practice is most likely to promote students' reading comprehension of informational texts by:

• modeling for them metacognitive comprehension strategies.

• giving them an example of fluent oral reading.

• summarizing for them the main ideas of an expository text.

• exposing them to new vocabulary in context.

75. A fifth-grade teacher plans to have students read a chapter about the American Revolutionary War from their social studies textbook. The following is an excerpt from the chapter.

Given this excerpt from the chapter, which of the following graphic organizers would best promote students' awareness of the chapter's text structure?

• outline

• Venn diagram

• timeline

• semantic map

76. A second-grade class includes several students who are developing-level (intermediate) English learners. The teacher is planning to use a whole-class read-aloud to provide instruction in making inferences when reading informational text. Which of the following differentiation strategies would best support students with diverse language abilities in making text-based inferences?

• inviting the English learners to read the passages that will be used in the lesson in advance and to refer back to the printed copies of the passages during the lesson

• offering the English learners alternative, literal comprehension-building activities (e.g., "Fill in the blank: The authors said ________. The text was mostly about ________.")

• collecting a variety of reference materials for the classroom, and making them freely available to the English learners as needed during instruction

• providing the English learners with sentence frames to scaffold the lesson (e.g., "I think that ________. I think so because I read ________ and because I know that ________.")

77. Two proficient readers are answering post-reading comprehension questions about a chapter in a content-area textbook.

- The first student demonstrates exceptional recall of details from the chapter but has difficulty answering questions about the gist of the chapter.

- The second student can give an outstanding summary of the chapter but has difficulty remembering specific facts from the chapter.

Which of the following best explains the most likely reason for the students' varied understanding of the text?

• The first student is more proficient than the second student at using metacognitive comprehension strategies to make sense of the text.

• Each student applied different reading comprehension skills when reading the text.

• The second student is more proficient at reading for literal understanding than for inferential understanding.

• Each student brought a unique set of prior experiences to the reading of the text.