Book: Thinking Strategies for Student Achievement
Denise D. Nessel and Joyce M. Graham, 2007, Corwin Press, 2nd Edition, Thousand Oaks, California; ISBN: 9781412938815
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Chapter 1: Analogies
Overview and Background
Incomplete analogies are often included in standardized tests because completing them correctly is considered evidence of high-level thinking. Studying and creating analogies helps students develop comprehension of vocabulary and concepts as they improve their reasoning ability and their critical thinking skills.
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Chapter 2: Anticipation Guide
Overview and Background
An anticipation guide is a set of statements based on material students are about to read, hear, or view. Students agree or disagree with the statements, discussing and debating their hypotheses and supporting their opinions with reasons from their own background of experience. Then they turn to the material to get more information. Finally, they consider the statements again, talk about how their thinking has changed, and review what they have learned.
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Instructional Benefits of this Strategy
- activates prior knowledge
- sharpens critical listening and thinking skills
- arouses curiosity, increasing motivation to read
- generates specific purposes for reading
- promotes active involvement in reading
- creates a pleasurable sense of discovery when finding information related to the hypotheses
- enhances retention by making information memorable
Step by Step
Before being successful with anticipation guides, students need experience speculating, listening to and responding directly to one another, and debating different points of view.
- Write several declarative statements about the topic that are based on information in the learning material. Some of the statements should be true and some should be false, but all should be worked so they sound plausible and will probably bring about differences of opinion among students.
- Before students read (listen, view) have them work with partners or in small groups to discuss the items and decide on their responses and their reasoning, then share their thinking with the whole class.
- In leading the discussion, frequently ask “Why do you think so?” and “Do you all agree?” to encourage students to explain their reasoning, make good use of their existing knowledge, and debate one another.
While encouraging students to use what they know to defend their hypothesis, you will also have a chance to achieve a better understanding of your students’ backgrounds and perspectives and encourage them to appreciate each other’s knowledge and experience. When students are expected to explain their reasoning, they rather naturally draw on what they know, what they have heard from others, or what they have read or seen on television. Sharing perspectives deepens the connections between participants in the discussion and strengthens their understanding of each other. - Have students read the material to confirm or reviews their ideas.
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Chapter 3: Carousel Brainstorming
Overview and Background
Carousel Brainstorming (Kagan, 1994) is a cooperative group activity…to engage class in generating ideas. Stends work in teams to brainstorm ideas at home station, writing them on a large sheet of paper. Then the teams move from station to station, adding their ideas to those of the other groups. When the teams return to their home station, they read the ideas that have been added to their paper, raise questions about that new information, and add ideas they may have obtained from other groups.
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Instructional Benefits of This Strategy
- encourages students to think about what they know and express it in their own words
- reinforces learning by having students restate ideas orally and in writing
- gives students opportunities to listen to and read each other’s ideas
- leads students to generate questions about what they have learned
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Chapter 4: Cloze Procedure
Overview and Background
The Close Procedure is a strategy for developing comprehension and inferential thinking skills. it makes use of a passage of text in which some words have been replaced with blanks. The reader writes in the words that have been deleted, inferring their identity by using the remaining words as clues. The activities give students opportunities for inferential thinking and close reading.
The Cloze Procedure was devised more than 50 years ago as a way of measuring text readability. It was given its name because the objective is to close the gaps left in the passage by the deletions.
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…the examiner gives the reader a passage with at least 50 blanks and computes the percentage of correct responses
- 55% and above = independent level (the student can probably read and comprehend the material independently)
- 38-54% = instructional level (the student can probably read and comprehend the material when guided by a teacher)
- 37%d and below = frustration level (the material is probably too difficult for the student even if the student’s reading is guided by a teacher).
Soon after being introduced as a diagnostic technique, the Cloze procedure was recognized as an effective instructional activity for building students’ reading and thinking skills.
Instructional Benefits of This Strategy
- activates linguistic knowledge
- refines inferential thinking abilities
- provides practice in the use of context clues to identify unfamiliar words
- develops the habit of careful, active reading
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Sudoku puzzles are nonlinguistic analogues of the close procedure. They develop and refine the same kind of inferential thinking abilities and can be an interesting alternate way of engaging students in this important thinking process.
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Chapter 5: Cubing
Overview and Background
Cubing is a thinking activity that encourages students to explore meanings of a given object, concept, or phenomenon from six perspectives, each of which calls for a different kind of high-level thought. The stimulus is a cube that has six different prompts, one on each face:
- describe
- compare/contrast
- associate
- analyze
- apply
- argue for or against
Instructional Benefits of This Strategy
- helps students think about a topic from multiple perspectives
- develops writing fluency
- develops flexibility in thinking
- encourages students to learn from each other by listening to each other’s responses
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For closure, lead a discussion with the whole class about how thinking about the topic in different ways affected their understanding of the topic and their writing. Here are some discussion prompts you may want to use:
- which kind of thinking was the easiest to do? Why
- Which kind of thinking did you enjoy the most? Why?
- Which kind of thinking did you find the hardest? Why?
- Which kind of thinking made you discover new aspects of the topic?
- In what ways has your understanding of the topic improved?
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Chapter 6: Directed Reading-Thinking Activity (DRTA)
Overview and Background
A Directed Reading Thinking Activity (DRTA) is a strategy for guiding readers through a text. They repeatedly speculate about what they will read next and then confirm or refute their hypotheses by reading. This approach develops critical thinking skills while also building vocabulary, comprehension, and reading fluency. The Directed Listening -Thinking Activity (DLTA) is a variation that involves the teacher reading the text aloud to the students. The questions used in a DRTA or DLTA vary somewhat, depending on whether the text has a narrative or expository structure.
Russell Stauffer designed the DRTA as an alternative to the Directed Reading Activity (DRA), a widely used method of guided reading. An important aspect of the DRA is stopping students periodically to ask them questions about the part they just read in order to monitor and develop their comprehension. The DRTA introduced a significant difference: The teacher asks students for hypotheses before they read each part of the text, inviting them to use their own experiences and clues in the text to predict successive events.
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Instructional Benefits of This Strategy
- activates prior knowledge
- arouses curiosity, increasing motivation to read
- leads students to have specific purposes for reading
- sharpens critical thinking and debating skills
- promotes active involvement in reading
- deepens and enhances comprehension of the material.
Step by Step (Narrative Text)
- review the story and select three or four stopping points that will afford good opportunities for speculation about upcoming events.
- at the start… present the title and perhaps the first few sentences of the story and ask students what they think is going to happen, and why
- Tell students they will be reading a little more of the story and stopping to make further predictions about what they think will happen next. … they can’t know for sure
- at the first stopping point…
- what do you think will happen next
- why do you think so
- do you all agree? why? why not?
- after a few minutes of discussion, tell students it’s time to read to get more information… read to next stopping point
- ask students if they have found information relating to any of their predictions and have them discuss the information…. return to step 4
- continue with the cycle of predict, read, discuss, predict, read, discuss until the group has finished the story
- …conduct a discussion at the end of the story:
- what was the most important part of the story to you? why?
- which character did you like the most? why?
- would you have acted differently than the characters did? how?
- what was the most surprising moment in the story to you? why
- what do you think would have happened if the story continued? why?e
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Step by Step (Expository Text)
- …review the text and generate three or four questions that will afford good opportunities for speculation about the information contained in the text.
The questions do not need to cover all the material in the text but should reflect some of the information that you consider important for the students to remember… prereading discussion is to stimulate curiosity and give students several specific purposes for reading - …tell students the topic and pose the questions one at a time. Tell them you don’t expect them to know the answers but that you are interested in what they think.
- When students’ curiosity has been piqued by the discussion, distribute the text and invite them to find information…
- When students finish reading, facilitate a discussion about what they know now. Ask them to support their assertions by referring to the information in the text.
- To bring closure to the lesson, use questions like these to help students summarize and reflect on the information they have acquired:
- what have we learned
- how might we organize or picture this information to remember it
- what was the most interesting piece of information you found
- to what else does this information relate
- what questions do you still have? what else would you like to know?
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Chapter 7: Facts and Inferences
Overview and Background
Facts and Inferences helps students learn to distinguish between explicitly stated information and information that can be inferred from available evidence. The strategy involves them in generating a wide variety of inferences.
For any given listening or reading occasion, they may not understand the significance of the available evidence, may not have enough experience to bring to the situations, or may not realize that inferential thinking is expected of them.
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Instructional Benefits of this Strategy
- develops the habit of inferential thinking
- refines and extends comprehension
- develops flexibility in thinking
- encourages students to learn from each other by listening to each other’s responses
- encourages students to evaluate the plausibility of their responses, thereby increasing one aspect of their critical thinking abilities
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Put the examples on the board in a chart that looks like this:
| Facts (Explicit Information) | Inferences (Implicit or Implied Information) |
| dark sky, gray clouds, wind blowing, umbrellas | It started raining |
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Chapter 8: Frayer Model for Concept Development
Overview and background
The Frayer Model for concept development helps students build a thorough understanding of a concept. The process involves contrasting examples of the concept with non-examples, determining essential and non-essential characteristics, and organizing the information into a cart.
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Dorothy Frayer’s work in cognitive psychology led her to develop this useful strategy for guiding students’ concept learning.
Instructional Benefits of This Strategy
- develops, refines, and extends the understanding of a concept
- elicits and improves analytical thinking abilities
- develops skills in systematic organizing of information
- provides a visual tool that aids retention of information
- encourages collaborative pooling of knowledge to deepen understanding
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Chapter 9: Freewriting
Overview and Background
Freewriting is a strategy that involves writing steadily without stopping and without worrying about mechanics for a predetermined period of time, usually somewhere between 2 and 10 minutes.
Instructional Benefits of This Strategy
- increases students writing fluency
- helps students get started on a writing assignment
- generates ideas for writing
- provides an opportunity to formulate ideas
- builds confidence in writing
- access prior knowledge
- helps students review what they have learned
- promotes ease with editing
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Step by Step
Explain the purpose of Freewriting to your students, telling them your goals for introducing it as a strategy. Model the process by doing a freewriting on the board while they watch.
Student Guidelines for Unfocused Freewriting
- Write for 3 to 5 minutes (or longer if you wish). Write whatever is on your mind.
- Don’t stop writing for any reason. Go steadily without rushing. If you can’t think of something to write, write “Thinking” or another word until the ideas start to flow again.
- Don’t stop to look back, to cross something out, or to wonder how to spell any words.
- If you can’t think of a word or spelling, just use a line or write, “I can’t think of it.”
- Don’t worry about how your writing sounds or looks, just keep on writing until the time is up.
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Because the value of Freewriting lies in the process, not the result, teachers ordinarily do not collect or grade freewriting products, although they may give credit to the students for engaging in the activity for the expected period of time or for producing a certain amount of writing.
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Chapter 10: Games for Thinking
Overview and Background
Having students systematically analyze a familiar game to understand its underlying principles is an excellent way to engage their thinking. A deeper understanding of a game also contributes to their sense of mastery of the game, which can, in turn, lead to great satisfaction as a learner.
In this tradition are such simple games as Tic-Tac-Toe or Nim that are easy to learn and fun to play and that also afford students the opportunity to analyze patterns and strategies systematically by studying the game from new perspectives once the rules of play are familiar.
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Instructional Benefits of This Strategy
- encourages inferential and analytical thinking
- refines observational skills
- develops skills in systematic observation and record keeping
- stimulates interest in logical thinking and problem-solving
Step by Step
- Teach students the game and encourage them to play it with different partners until they become fully familiar with the rules and have had fun competing against each other.
- Pose questions about the game that invite students to play cooperatively and analyze the moves in order to develop a deeper understanding of the game.
- Have students write their observations as a collaborative summary of the analyses they completed.
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Chapter 11: Graphic Organizers
Overview and Background
…used to arrange information on a page so that the relationships among the concepts are made clear visually.
..the Venn diagram…was first used in mathematics to show the relationship between elements in a set.
…a T-chart is used to organize information about two topics or main ideas. A flowchart with boxes and arrows, commonly seen in the business world to lay out a plan of action, can be used in (Pg 76) the classroom to organize information into chronological order…
Research shows that when students use graphic organizers their comprehension and learning increase.
Instructional Benefits of This Strategy
- helps students understand relationships among ideas
- refines and extends comprehension of information
- helps students see learned information from a new perspective
- provides students with an independent study strategy
- refines and extends the kind of thinking required to construct the organiser
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Chapter 12: I-Search Reporting
Overview and Background
An I-Search report is an original piece of expository writing that’s based on a question the writer poses and then answers by researching information. The research may include interviews and observations as well as the use of print and electronic sources.
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Instructional Benefits of This Strategy
- allows report writing to grow from students’ own interests and purposes
- develops research and reporting skills
- develops critical thinking skills related to evaluation of source material
- stimulates interesting, original expository writing
- prepares students for writing more formal research reports that are based on reading
- refines and extends general writing abilities
Step by Step
- Have students identify an interest and formulate questions about it related to their concerns and pursuits.
- Have students work in pairs or groups to make lists of possible sources of information.
- Allow time for students to gather information and take notes over the course of several days or longer.
- When students are ready to write their drafts, have them write in the first person, as if they are simply talking to someone about what questions they had, whom they consulted, what they did to find the answers, and what they discovered.
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Chapter 13: Imitation Writing
When students engage in Imitation Writing, they follow (or imitate) the structure or pattern of a model. The model can be a sentence, a paragraph, a poem, or some other piece of writing that’s either selected from an existing work or composed by the teacher. The process involves four steps:
- read the model carefully.
- Copy the model word for word
- substitute synonyms for as many words as possible
- write on a different topic using the same syntactical structure as the model
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Instructional Benefits of This Strategy
- improves writing versatility and expressiveness
- challenges creative thinking and writing within a fixed structure
- increases understanding of sentence and paragraph structure
- encourages analysis of language structures
- refines reading comprehension ability
- develops reading and writing vocabularies
- establishes a base for learning grammar concepts
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Chapter 16: Key Word Notes
Overview and background
key Word Notes is a strategy for processing information while reading by writing and talking with a partner. the processing aids comprehension and retention, whereas the notes that are generated can be used in writing a summary of the information.
Instructional Benefits of This Strategy
- encourages attentive, active reading
- gives students practice in identifying important details
- provides opportunities for restating information
- encourages students to state and write information in their own words
- enhances retention of information after reading
- builds collaborative-learning skills
- gives students a study strategy they can use on their own
Before being successful with this strategy, students need experience identifying important details when they read informational text, and they need experience listening to and responding directly to a partner.
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Chapter 17: Key Word Prediction
instructional Benefits of this Strategy
- activates prior knowledge before reading, listening, or viewing
- arouses curiosity about the topic
- stimulates high-level speculation and prediction
- promotes student-to-student interaction
- encourages students to set purposes for learning
Step by Step
Before being successful with Key Word Prediction, students need to experience forming hypotheses based on clues, listening to and responding directly to one another, and debating different points of view.
- from the expository material, select eight to fifteen terms that relate to the topic and that can be associated with each other in different ways.
Sample lesson plans
