Development 2000). Different types of questioning can
help students clarify meaning, speculate about text,
analyze an author’s perspective, analyze the language
an author uses, and focus on specific aspects of the text.
Students can also use questions to organize, elaborate,
probe, and sort information and structures in a text,
such as compare and contrast or cause and effect.
Teachers help students make meaning as they
model their own comprehension processes using think
alouds and then ask students to practice the same
think aloud process. These metacognitive conversations
(Schoenbach, Greenleaf, and Murphy 2012) provide a
way for students to figure out where their understanding
is incomplete and how to clarify their confusions.
Teacher modeling of the use of different types of
questions also helps students go beyond clarifying
questions to ask questions that engage critical thinking and analysis. For example, describing
questions as thin or thick helps students conceptualize questions along a continuum from basic or
obvious to more complex or unstated. Thin questions are literal, recall questions whose answers are
provided in the text. Thick questions require student readers to go beyond the text and speculate,
hypothesize, or make inferences (Lewin 2010). Using Bloom’s taxonomy, students can learn to identify
different types of questions, ranging from questions that pull facts and information from the text, to
questions that ask the reader to examine and analyze the information in the text by understanding
what is missing or implied, to questions that reflect on the author’s point of view or that offer a
different perspective on the topic (Bloom 1956)^2. Using questions to guide student thinking and
understanding helps students learn to make inferences (RL/RI.6–8.1), integrate knowledge and ideas
(RL/RI.6–8.7, RI.6–8.8, RL/RI.6–8.9) and further comprehension.
Using Other Comprehension Strategies. The
report, Improving Adolescent Literacy: Effective Classroom
and Intervention Practices, recommends that direct and
explicit comprehension strategy instruction be provided.
This recommendation is well-supported in the research
and tied to improved reading outcomes (Kamil, and others
2008; Boardman, and others 2008). The goal of strategy
instruction is to help students become active readers who
are in charge of their own comprehension and are capable
of using tools to make sense of what they read (Kosanovich,
Reed, and Miller 2010). According to the National Reading
Panel report (NRP 2000, as found in Boardman, and others
2008), comprehension “involves complex cognitive processes
that enable the reader to gain meaning from the text and
repair misunderstandings when they occur.”
Successful readers monitor their own comprehension
as they read and make connections between new information and prior learning, including other
texts they have read, knowledge, and personal experiences (Boardman, and others 2008). When
text is conceptually dense, challenging to understand, or uninteresting, successful readers use fix-up
2 While both Bloom’s Taxonomy and Webb’s Depth of Knowledge (DOK) provide descriptors for levels of cognitive
complexity, they were developed separately for different purposes. See chapter 2 of this ELA/ELD Framework for further
discussion of DOK levels. See Hess (2013) for a comparison of Revised Bloom’s Taxonomy and DOK.Different types of questioning can
help students clarify meaning,
speculate about text, analyze an
author’s perspective, analyze the
language an author uses, and
focus on specific aspects of the text.
Students can also use questions to
organize, elaborate, probe, and
sort information and structures in a
text, such as compare and contrast
or cause and effect.The report, Improving
Adolescent Literacy: Effective
Classroom and Intervention
Practices, recommends
that direct and explicit
comprehension strategy
instruction be provided. This
recommendation is well-
supported in the research
and tied to improved reading
outcomes.516 | Chapter 6 Grades 6 to 8