Improve Your Child's Reading Comprehension and Retention
Friday September 1, 2006
In recent years, researchers have been gathering research on the characteristics of readers. By observing both strong readers and those with learning disabilities, we have learned more about what good readers do that helps them understand and remember what they read. Studies have been conducted with learning disabled students who were taught to use the strategies that successful readers frequently used. The studies suggested that many students with learning disabilities can benefit by learning these strategies and using them to improve their understanding of reading material and recall of information. Check out these quick tips that can help.
For the student who learns best when they see and experience information, we have seen four major issues that are often missed:
- Sight word vocabulary — those little words like and, the, but that are often not understood
- Pattern recognition — kids often see a word on one page and do not recognize it on the next
- Visual perception — they skip words and lines when reading
- Attention — their mind wanders
Usually the issues are a combination of two, three and half the time even all four of these issues
Mira,
I’ve also seen those common characteristics with readers who have comprehension problems. Some related articles on the learning disabilities site include:
Tips to Develop Sight Word Vocabulary and How to make a Reading Guide. Thanks for your helpful comments, Mira.
My daughter has been struggling with math and reading for the past 2 years. Some days her performance in excellent, likewise, some days her performance is extremely poor. She excells in phonics and spelling. She reads well, however, her comprehension (if she reads the info causes problems)causes questions to be raised about learning disabilities and which one(s) she may have. I have been working with her teacher and she is various tutoring sessions. Hopefully these sessions will show progress. Who can I turn to help diagnosis her problem? We took advantage of a program through the school she attended previously. The only recommendations were– to give her praise and medication. Nothing was said about developing a learning plan to help increase the areas she is lacking.