Reciprocal Teaching Assessment and Intervention Tips

Prediction

1. Observe students’ use of strategies. Do they:

• Preview the cover, illustrations, table of contents, headings before reading?
• Stop to predict during reading?
• Base their predictions on background knowledge and/or clues from the text and illustrations?
• Make logical predictions?
• Use the language of predictions? (See sentence stems under prediction activities)

2. Watch for students who are having trouble providing evidence for their predictions or who make predictions that don’t make sense.

3. Review how good readers use the cover, illustrations, text features, and background knowledge to make predictions.

Questioning

1. Observe students’ use of strategies. Do they:

• Ask questions before, during, and after reading?
• Ask questions based on the text?
• Ask main idea, detail, and inference questions?
• Use the question words who, what, where, when, why, what if, how?

2. Watch for students who ask only detail-oriented questions or are having trouble formulating main idea and inference questions.

3. Model, model, model!

4. Work with struggling readers in a small guided reading group to model and practice questioning.

Clarifying

1. Observe students’ use of strategies. Do they:

1. Identify words and ideas that are unclear or unfamiliar?
2. Use a variety of fix-up strategies when comprehension breaks down?
3. Express which strategy or strategies helped them solve a word or clarify an idea? (I didn’t understand that part, so I…)

2. Watch for students who:

• Tend to rely on one strategy too much (i.e., “sounding out” when another strategy would be more helpful).
• Skim over trouble spots without taking time to clarify.
• Clarify words but struggle with clarifying ideas.
• Skip clarifying altogether because they think they have nothing to clarify.

3. If a student is reluctant to identify a word or idea to clarify, encourage him to point out something that might be troubling for a younger reader.

4. Review how good readers use a variety of strategies to repair comprehension (see “fix-up strategies” in the clarifying section).

5. Work with struggling readers in a small guided reading group to model and practice using a variety of fix-up strategies.

Summarizing

1. Observe students’ use of strategies. Do they:

• Give a clear, concise summary in their own words?
• Reread to remember main ideas?
• Summarize the text in sequential order for narrative text and logical order for expository text?
• Leave out details that aren’t important? Tell only the most important ideas?
• Use the language of summarizing? (See sentence stems in the summarizing section).

2. Watch for students who:

• Cannot remember what they have read.
• Have difficulty stating just the main ideas.
• Just restate the text without condensing it into their own words.
• Include unimportant details.
• Have difficulty summarizing in sequential or logical order.

3. Work with struggling readers in a small guided reading group to model and practice summarizing.

4. Remind students that it is okay to look back in the text to help them summarize.

5. If students are having trouble summarizing independently, have them practice group summaries. After having each group present their summaries to the class, have the class vote on the best summary.

6. Have struggling students practice constructing summaries using slightly below grade level text.