Edstrom Educational Consulting

Over the past few blogs, we have been examining what makes a reader passionate and have been compiling lists of the books we love and adore.   Part of what makes us passionate about reading is our ability to connect to what we read.  In fact, in their work, Strategies That Work: Teaching Comprehension to Enhance Understanding, Stephanie Harvey and Anne Goudvis address this very topic.  They explain that our context, what we have experienced, know, feel and understand plays a powerful role on how and what we learn.   Across the board we find that those that are strong readers will both consciously and unconsciously relate what they are reading to their personal context and will use it to help them comprehend what they are reading.   This experience of making connections with the text helps to enrich the quality and depth of comprehension.  Likewise, most reading teachers know that struggling readers will plow through their reading assignments without stopping to make the critical connections to their own background and therefore they lose out on comprehension.   As teachers, we must examine how we can teach students to connect to the text.   A more in depth examination of schema theory can be found at this website.