All students can benefit from this learning strategy.
Wrap Up is one fourth of Collaborative Strategic Reading (CSR), a learning strategy shown to improve students’ reading comprehension when all four parts of CSR are used by students. The role of Wrap Up is to aid students in understanding and remembering what they have learned. This strategy requires two steps: generating questions and reviewing important ideas. As students often have difficulty generating effective questions from text, it may take time for them to learn this skill.
According to extensive research on CSR, Wrap Up must be implemented as part of the CSR strategy if positive effects are to be achieved.
Use explicit instruction (explanation, modeling, guided practice, independent practice) when teaching CSR to students.
Using Explicit Instruction to Teach CSR: Wrap Up
1. Explain the strategy. Using a poster showing where Wrap Up fits into CSR and another poster of steps for Wrap Up, explain both posters and explain the benefit students will experience from using Wrap Up and from CSR after they have learned all of it.
2. Model the strategy. Next, use modeling. Use a think aloud strategy, and voice aloud the thought process behind each step. This may need to occur over the course of several days based on the needs of the students.
3. Guided practice: Guide students in performing the strategy in small groups or in pairs. During this time, scaffold the learning and support students who need assistance in using the strategy. They can also model the think aloud strategy (when in pairs) to strengthen comprehension and learning of the steps involved.
4. Independent practice: After guided practice, students should only use the strategy independently, once they have shown they have mastered the strategy. Students can also be given the opportunity to reflect on the strategy.
How to Use Wrap Up
Part I: Generate and answer questions from text
1. Students brainstorm a number of possible questions. If using a CSR learning log, they should write them in the Wrap Up section under Questions about the important ideas in the passage.
2. Students can arrange the questions according to a question hierarchy that reflects lower-to-higher order thinking. Students should next try to answer the questions. A question that cannot be answered might not be a good question or might require clarification.
Part II: Review what was learned
1. Students write down the most important ideas from the day’s reading in their learning logs in the Wrap Up section under What I learned. This requires them to mentally organize the information and to focus on comprehending the text as a whole.
2. Students can take turns sharing with partners, groups, or the rest of the class what they consider to be their best ideas.
Adapted from The IRIS Center. (2008). CSR: A reading comprehension strategy. Retrieved from http://iris.peabody.vanderbilt.edu/module/csr/
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