3720 Final Exam

A second-grade teacher is reading aloud a literary text to the class. Which of the following post-reading activities would be most likely to promote the students’ comprehension of the story by enhancing their literary analysis skills?

• Asking the students to reread the story silently and respond to several literal comprehension questions.

• Having the students freewrite about the story in their reading response journals.

• Discussing with the students how the characters in the story respond to major events and challenges

• Encouraging the students to identify key vocabulary words in the story

A third-grade teacher observes that students who can read aloud fluently also demonstrates comprehension of expository texts. The best explanation for this is that fluent readers:

• have well developed skills for decoding any level of text word by word.

• have already developed the base of background knowledge typically covered by textbooks.

• possess self-awareness that allows them to use metacognitive skills efficiently.

• are able to focus their full attention and cognitive resources on the meaning of the text.

Which of the following strategies would be most important to use to promote second-grade students’ ability to analyze key ideas and details in literary text?

• Asking students text dependent who, what, when, where, why, and how questions about story elements

• Prompting students to evaluate the significance of the story’s setting with respect to its theme

• Explicitly teaching students the key features and conventions of different literary genres

• Encouraging students to clarify their understanding of a story

A fourth-grade teacher is planning a lesson focused on promoting students’ recognition of distinguishing features of prose, poetry, and drama. The teacher plans to begin the lesson by having students follow along as the teacher reads aloud three short passages- a chapter from a novel, a narrative poem, and a scene from a play. Afterward, the teacher plans to lead a whole-class discussion about the passages. Which of the following post-reading activities would be most effective in helping the students prepare for the discussion and achieve the lesson’s objective?

• Having pairs of students use a graphic organizer to compare how major story elements such as setting, characters, and plot are conveyed in the three passages.

• Asking students to take notes in their literature journals while they reread the three passages silently then review the notes before the discussion

• Having students meet in small groups of four or five to consider the question, “Which of the three passages affected you most powerfully?”

• Asking individual students to freewrite for two minutes in response to the prompt, “Which of the three passages did you like best, and why?”

Some children in a kindergarten class have had a limited amount of exposure to storybooks read aloud and/or limited prior experience discussing narrative texts. Their teacher wants to develop their knowledge of story structure. According to evidence-based best practices, which of the following instructional approaches is most likely to accelerate the children's understanding of the casual nature of story events?

• Having children practice putting photocopies of pictures taken from storybooks in the order of which they occurred in the book.

• Asking text dependent questions about the key details and story events

• Teaching story events explicitly, such as main character, goal or problem, and resolution as part of the daily read aloud

• Rereading favorite stories to children and letting them dress up like characters

Students in a fourth grade class read a text that includes the word indefensible, which is unfamiliar to some of them. Which of the following strategies for teaching the word would be most effective in both clarifying the meaning of the word and extending the students' understanding and use of an appropriate word learning strategy?

Which of the following strategies would best help students understand the meaning of a new vocabulary word in context?

• using print and digital reference materials to explain the word's meaning to the students before they read the text

• using print and digital reference materials to explain the word's meaning to the students before they read the text

• having the students enter the word in their ongoing list of new vocabulary words and then looking up the word in the dictionary independently

• asking the students to paraphrase the sentence that contains the word by substituting a synonym for the word

A fifth-grade teacher plans to use the passage below in a lesson focused on analyzing literary texts. Zander told me it didn't matter what the exact rules were, or what was "fair" according to Coach. What mattered most was the team winning against Sagamore and advancing to the next level. "So, okay? You in?" he asked me. I just looked at him without saying a word. I like Zander. He's funny, smart, popular—everything I'm not. So I wanted to say, Sure, let's do it. But I kept seeing Coach's face in my mind, like he was looking me right in the eye. "I don't know," I said slowly. Zander's eyes narrowed and his mouth set firmly shut. Oh, great, I thought. Now I'll have NO friends at school. The teacher is planning text-based questions to use in a post-reading discussion about the passage. Which of the following organizing questions would most effectively prompt students' higher-order analysis of this passage?

• Who says "What matters most is the team winning" and how can you tell?

• How are the narrator's relationships with Zander and Coach similar yet different?

• How does the narrator describe the character named Zander and the character referred to as Coach?

• How does the author use dialogue to advance the plot?

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. The Battle of Bunker Hill took place on June 17, 1775. At the time, the American army occupied the area from Cambridge to the Mystic River. American troops gathered in Cambridge Common on the evening of June 16, 1775, and set out for Bunker Hill. Upon reaching Bunker Hill, however, officers decided to move to Breed's Hill, a smaller hill closer to Boston. Given this excerpt from the chapter, which of the following graphic organizers would best promote students' awareness of the chapter's text structure?

• semantic map

• outline

• Venn Diagram

• timeline

A third-grade teacher periodically reads aloud from a chapter in content-area textbooks using think-aloud while reading. Following is an example. "The moon does not shine on its own. The sun's light reflects off the moon." Hmm. I'm imagining that the sun is like a flashlight shining on the moon in the dark. "As the moon rotates, only the part that faces the sun is visible from the Earth." I'm not quite sure what 'visible' means, but it sounds kind of like vision, which I know has to do with eyes. It probably means the part that we can see from the Earth. Now, that makes me wonder—why do we see different amounts of the moon at different times? Let's see if the next part of the chapter explains this. ... The teacher's practice is most likely to promote students' reading comprehension of informational texts by:

• modeling for them metacognitive comprehension strategies

• summarizing for them the main ideas of an expository text

• exposing them to new vocabulary in context