I recently read a suggestion from a discussion page that talked about the issue of helping students 'read to learn', instead of 'learning to read'. This is a subject I will cover more somewhere else, but the main point of the discussion was that children coming out of elementary schools into middle school can sometimes struggle when reading textbooks, especially when they are reading to try to learn information, or gather data for further study. The hard part is trying to help students organize the information in their head. Students who have a reading disability are often helped by having information presented to them more visually. There is a technique available called Text Mapping which involves the use of scrolls instead of books. The premise is that when the pages are copied and taped together in a scroll format, that the entire chapter or storyline is laid out in a continuous form, which is easier to 'map' out. This is opposed to the concept of looking at a book, which only presents two pages at a time.

I will be trying this technique out on my son, who struggles with concentrating on textbooks and 'data' when he is trying to find answers to questions at the ends of chapters. When I have had a good chance to try this throughout the second half of his school year, I will let you know if it helps him to organize his thoughts better. It seems like a fairly inexpensive way to re-present the material that he has to study, and will hopefully take the fear out of his homework time. (Doing reading homework in our house is a big struggle for me, and I've been trying to find ways to make it easier.) I will try to post any suggestions, or problems, that I come across while trying this technique. But it DOES sound really useful.

To try this technique yourself, go to the website: http://www.textmapping.org/. They describe the technique, as well as the purposes behind it. It is a free site for anyone who wants to try it, and there is also a call for research in this area. It sounds like a fairly new technique, and so I'm sure there are many opportunities to devise research plans. If you know of anyone using this technique, or researching it, please let me know!

A teacher that I know once gave me a suggestion using post-it notes to help students recall what they had just read. A lot of students tend to read, and read and keep reading, but don't always remember what they read 3 pages ago. This teacher would take a small post it note, and place it at different locations throughout a story, and whenever the student stopped at a post-it, they had to write down something about what they just read before they could remove the post-it and keep reading. They then would place all the post-its on a separate piece of paper, and would end up with a nice little outline of the story from the post-its that they wrote on.

If you don't know what it is like to have a reading problem, or have problems retaining information that you read, go to this link http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/misunderstoodminds/experiences/readexp2a.html and try the experiment there. It is a great example of how children struggle to remember information they have read.

Here's another good one: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/misunderstoodminds/experiences/readexp1a.html
If you were in the School Psych program, and had to help administer DIBELS assessments, then you will be able to relate to this. I know while I was assessing some children, I realized how difficult it is to associate phonemes with a character on a page. This helps you understand those children who did not do as well as the others.