Reading Improvement: Helping Students Develop Sustained Attention

Father helps daughter improve reading comprehension.
Learning Sustained Attention

Students’ heavy reliance on today’s electronic devices can lead to fragmented attention and reduced focus on educational tasks. Gloria Mark, Ph.D., from the University of California, Irvine, found that people change their focus every 47 seconds when using screens, marking a 50% decrease in attention span over a decade.

The question is “How do we help students develop sustained attention to reading tasks?”  Reading researchers have looked at comprehension monitoring, an important subskill for successful reading comprehension. Good readers are aware of how well they are understanding as well as how well they are storing information in memory for later retrieval.  Unfortunately, poor readers are often unaware that they are failing to understand or remember information
Both good and poor readers can improve sustained attention. One method is to ask students if pairs of sentences have the same meaning, such as “The horse ate the apple” and “The apple was eaten by the horse.” Despite different surface structures, their deep structures have the same meaning. The discernment requires quite a bit of attention.

By determining if sentences share the same or different meanings, readers develop sustained attention. They learn that meaning comes from sentences and paragraphs, not individual words. Practice in the active construction of meaning improves the retention of information.

“Accomplish Reading” is a free six-part app that helps students improve their reading comprehension and focus. It can be downloaded to iPads and Apple Business Manager from www.accomplishonline.com. The app’s Demo feature demonstrates how each part works and how direct instruction as feedback enhances instruction and learning.

Intentional Text Mistakes Helps Students Develop Metacognitive Reading Skills

 

 

Reading Enjoyment
Emma Reads for Enjoyment

Intentional Text Mistakes Helps Students Develop

Metacognitive Reading Skills

Providing texts with inserted mistakes is a great way to teach upper elementary students how to monitor their comprehension, a metacognitive reading skill. It takes a little extra time to change up your texts, but it will be well with your effort.

Providing texts with inserted mistakes is a great way to teach upper elementary students how to monitor their comprehension, a metacognitive reading skill. It takes a little extra time to change up your texts, but it will be well with your effort.

Fostering Comprehension Monitoring by Creating Altered Texts

Providing upper elementary students with altered texts is a great way to help them learn comprehension monitoring. In “Accomplish Reading,” students read a sentence or paragraph and decide whether it makes sense. Some sentences are written correctly, but some sentences are written with slight absurdities.

If they understand correctly and respond correctly, the app allows them to go to the next question. However, if they read the sentence incorrectly or with little attention, the message “Re-read the sentence” appears. Re-reading is another strategy that helps students develop metacognitive reading skills which improves comprehension.

“Accomplish Reading” app begins with students making decisions about sentences “Does the sentence make sense?” It progresses to paragraphs, i.e., “Is this a good title for the following paragraph.”

“Accomplish Reading” improves reading comprehension. If you click on the link, Emma will provide an example. https://youtu.be/QpMXVzcIBII?si=1zK7sFY7kNkJBazp. 

For additional examples, you can download “Accomplish Reading” (free). After downloading, to an Apple iPad, tap “Demo Mode” which shows all six parts of the program. Each part has sentences or paragraphs with intentional mistakes to help students learn comprehension monitoring or self-correcting, a metacognitive reading skill.

Jane Offutt, Ph.D., Reading Specialist