2 Comprehensive Strategies to Teach Students in a Smart Manner

Background knowledge of an individual comprises of the experiences with the surrounding environment.

It also includes their personal viewpoints regarding facts like the information they read and their own conceptions about how written text functions.

They include print conceptions, word identification, word meaning, and text organization.

The present accumulated knowledge of the readers signifies the capability to perceive their reading. 

Among many other scientific achievements by cognitive experts, the “schema theory” explains the functionality of comprehension.

The schema theory determines the process in which individuals organize and utilize their knowledge.

The Schema Theory

The schema theory suggests that people from a giant interconnected network of knowledge structures, also called “schemas”.

All such schemas remain cross-connected with one another and form a relation among themselves.

The schemas develop and transform with the person gathering new data from reading and experience.

A child might carry a single schema of his/her dog based on his/her pet as a playful furry and white creature.

But, the growth in experience can help him/her classify the dog species into different variants.

The differences in – dog species, dog colors, dog foods, ferocious dogs, temporary locations of dogs when their owners are outside, the identity of veterinarians, and dog show locations.

Applying the schema theory with comprehension reading revealed that good readers grasp the new knowledge and update it with their early background knowledge.

These readers initiate a schema while they start reading.

The activation of one schema affects the other schemas, which impacts the understanding and reaction of other readers to any text. 

Ways to improve understanding

Questioning while reading can help readers focus on the main ideas to help them accumulate crucial information details in the text.

Asking good questions can help readers to identify and concentrate on some of the most vital text portions.

Students can make inferences to “fill-in-the-gap” of information within a text.

The lack of complete details in a text does not mean that it has no clues in it.

These clues can help readers to “bridge the gap” in the information and obtain knowledge.

The capacity to use inference can help a student to construct meaning from his/her reading.

Readers can obtain meaning from the text they are reading with the help of informed predictions.

These people form a connection between the new information and their past knowledge.

Summarizing a text can help readers to gather information about the text for a quick recall.

Readers can remain aware of the vital portions in a text, the related ideas involved and text organization.

Summarizing can help to form the proper connections and perform synthesis on it.

The capacity to visualize the meaning from a text can help one to improve their memory retention capacity.

Students can use visualization for both expository and narrative texts to improve their memory and remember better.

Comprehension monitoring can help readers identify the time periods when they can understand better and not.

Readers must keep track of their cognitive capabilities to better improve their understanding.