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- Advance organizers are helpful to all students but are particularly so for struggling readers.
- Previewing activates and expands the readers' prior knowledge and schemata, encourages thinking, and brings written text to life.
- Teachers who attend to previews typically use a combination of teacher-guided and student-controlled activities.
- Prior knowledge of a text's subject gives a reader "hooks" on which to hang new information and from which to make inferences, thus improving comprehension.
- Research shows that prior knowledge is more vital for comprehending expository text than for comprehending narrative texts.
- All students tend to benefit from activation of prior knowledge, but the benefits are most noteworthy for students with learning disabilities.
- Students with weak or no prior knowledge may fail to comprehend because they lack information from which to make inferences.
- Failure to comprehend may stem from inadequate utilization of existing knowledge or failure to activate that knowledge when reading.
- Some students rely too much on their own experience in constructing meaning, ignoring the actual text in the process.
- Typically, with expository text, students are asked to connect new information with other known information, not personal experience.
- Researchers have found that when students used the PKA strategy, they perform higher on application-level comprehension and demonstrate more positive attitudes toward reading.
- Research shows that teaching prediction in combination with other comprehension techniques improves comprehension for students with learning disabilities.
- Although students were successful in gathering advance information about a story with teacher guidance, in general poor comprehenders were not successful without teacher assistance.
- The extent of direct teacher involvement needs to be regulated in terms of age of students, difficulty of material, and students' prior knowledge status.
- The ultimate goal should be to help students develop habits of activating prior knowledge before or during the reading of texts and using that knowledge to predict content and structure of the material.
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