"Autism at-a-Glance" is a series of practitioner and family-friendly documents created by the Center on Secondary Education for Students with ASD (CSESA) designed for high school staff members supporting students on the autism spectrum, as well as family members of adolescents with ASD. The purpose of the "Autism at-a-Glance"…

Presents an instructional strategy designed to teach inferential comprehension to primary grade children through the use of prior knowledge and prereading activities. (FL)

Provides suggestions for activating prior knowledge, getting children to be aware when their comprehension is lagging, and tying it all together at the end. (FL)

Reviews the literature on the effect of prior knowledge and text familiarity on document comprehension and usability. Discusses current methods for assessing subjects' topic familiarity. Presents an empirically based method for effectively assessing topic familiarity. Explains that the method includes use of two subject groups and reliance on…

An interactive approach to teaching French second-language reading comprehension is described. The method emphasizes involving the readers in the comprehension process and encouraging them to draw on prior learning to create hypotheses about the text's content. A four-stage instructional process is outlined. (MSE)

Describes a teaching strategy in which teachers ask questions that help students activate their existing knowledge about a text to be read in order to facilitate the learning of new concepts. (FL)

Discusses the effect of previous knowledge on reading comprehension. Suggests reading instruction methods that evoke the readers' experiences, or schemata, relevant to the material. (HTH)

A study with 18 deaf high school students found that skills that actually contribute to reading proficiency included use of prior text information, prior knowledge, reading speed and consistency, use of active memory for function words and inflections, and correct processing of relative clauses and the passive voice. Instructional implications are…

When using outside sources in their writing, students must learn to balance efficiency with effectiveness. In other words, they must express themselves clearly and quickly, providing readers with enough explicit information to create a causal chain based on reasonable inferences. Yet they must guard against being overly explicit, boring their…

Describes 10 categories of inferences and proposes a three-step procedure for teaching students to make inferences while reading. (HOD)

Argues that children develop knowledge in layers, increasing those layers each time the topic is covered. Reviews three sets of materials that provide a background of experience, vocabulary, and text structure for use in science instruction. (FL)

Planned, individualized vocabulary instruction is an essential ingredient of developmental reading classes, and deserves special attention, since expanding word knowledge is the one area related to reading comprehension in which student progress can be directly observed and measured by the learner in daily or weekly increments. The two factors…

Noting that many prereading discussions lead teachers to "mis-estimate" students' prior knowledge about a particular topic, this paper describes the Pre-Reading Plan (PReP) designed to help both students and teachers become aware of what students already know about a specific topic. Following an introduction, the first portion of the…

Describes semantic mapping, an effective strategy for vocabulary instruction that involves the categorical structuring of information in graphic form and requires students to relate new words to their own experience and prior knowledge. (HOD)

This book explores the question of how students become thoughtful, independent readers who deeply understand what they read by examining the thought processes of proficient readers. The book then uses these processes as models for the strategies it offers--strategies intended to help children become more flexible, adaptive, independent, and…