The Background

The System Each student receives a composition book. The composition book is not simply "for notes": it is to apply any one of very specific reading-study strategies. The composition book is collected from time to time. Students may be graded on their application of the study strategy. I have discovered that sometimes students started writing me notes, so they can correspond with me this way too.

The following strategies are applied in the booklet. The links are to the old rubrics-training forms I used to copy and hand out separately. The Samples are from a workbook in PDF format.

• SKWRL    [Sample]
• SQ3R       [Sample]
• History Frame       [Sample]

In addition to the reading strategies, the following study strategies may be used:

• Cornell Notes - notes from class presentation or text      [Sample]
• Questions from Textbook - These must be answered in complete sentences.      [Sample]
• Folded Page Technique - a variation on flashcards      [Sample]
• Outline      [Sample]
• Summary      [Sample]

[TOP]

As part of an ongoing career-long effort to help Middle Schoolers learn to learn, in May-June of 2009 I experimented with a system for one of my two sections of 7th grade. The system consists of an old fashioned composition book in which a variety of reading-study strategies are applied.

I am committed to teaching reading and study skills. I have adapted a variety of common techniques for students to use to "process" information. By "process information", I mean selecting important things to learn and applying some mental act to the information to learn it. I devised rubrics or "training forms" for these processes and, once students were trained to use them, I allowed some choice from time to time as a way of differentiating: students would gravitate toward the study tactics that seemed to serve them best.

This seemed to be going well for 3-4 years. Then I encountered a group with a larger than normal population of students in academic difficulty. I decided that I was not providing enough training in the strategies for them to "stick" and become an unconscious practice for students. I also found that many students often lost the very study papers we created in class, so they could not apply the strategy to prepare for test and quizzes. In these students' previous experience, I believe that grades were more heavily based on homework and information transfer activities than quizzes and tests of recall or analysis of information. Many were sunk in the new world of my class were knowledge counts and worksheets count for little. They continued to be passive learners who were surprised and frustrated by their low grades. Their weak reading skills hampered their progress as well. Once the study papers were lost, they had to rely on the text and did not possess the skills or motivation to learn from the text without assistance.