Q&A Hero

Q: The Content Reading Inventory is the only way to assess the match between students and their textbook.

Q: There are a variety of informal assessment procedures that can be used across the content areas.

Q: Formal assessment procedures such as standardized tests offer teachers no particular advantages.

Q: Assessment involves teachers in a process that begins the school year.

Q: List three techniques that teachers can use to determine whether their textbooks are appropriate and suitable for their students.

Q: Discuss the guidelines that should be considered when content area teachers use grades as a form of evaluation.

Q: What types of work can be included in a portfolio?

Q: In order to capitalize on the usefulness of portfolios, what are the principles suggested by research studies?

Q: Explain the two basic parts of a Content-Area Inventory and the information it would provide teachers about their students.

Q: Discuss some specific ways in which content area teachers can use their classroom activities as opportunities for assessment.

Q: Imagine that you are talking to a parent group about standardized tests and they want to know more about grade equivalents. How would you explain this concept to them?

Q: Discuss the uses and limitations of standardized tests.

Q: Explain why it is important to include students' belief systems in the assessment process.

Q: Describe some ways in which students can be involved in the assessment process.

Q: Skillful disciplinary teachers understand that the meaning making and meaning using process occurs more readily within supportive social contexts.

Q: Opinionniares are not beneficial in promoting deep and meaningful understandings of content area topics.

Q: One strategy for sensitizing students to both micro- and macrostructures of expository and informational prose is process mapping.

Q: Text-based processing is literal-level comprehension, or right there thinking.

Q: Comprehension theory holds that students learn best when they are taught how to create or generate their own learning prompts and demonstrations.

Q: It has been demonstrated that acts of meaning making and meaning using decrease when teachers exploit the social world of the classroom and socially-derived texts from their students.

Q: The social dimension takes into account that making, extracting and using meaning is a social process.

Q: Issues of engagement, identity, agency, and goals comprise the personal dimension of comprehension.

Q: A class textbook's structure and design will not impact on a student's ability to achieve a moderate degree comprehension.

Q: The cognitive dimension of comprehension requires us to consider how the structure and properties of prose and other texts interact with and stimulate a reader's capacity for constructing and using meaning.

Q: Comprehension as a cognitive process is concerned with the skills, strategies, and background knowledge of the reader.

Q: The various factors inherent in acts of meaning making and meaning using can be framed around what we consider to be four critical, interrelated dimensions: cognitive, textual, personal, and social.

Q: Describe an important feature of considerate text? Explain your answer.

Q: What are story grammars and who do they help with predictable structures or patterns?

Q: What are process guides and how can they expand comprehension?

Q: Describe how disciplinary teachers can increase long-term recall of newly learned information?

Q: What is the difference between a process statement and a content statement? Provide an example.

Q: What are microstructures and macrostructures and how do they relate to a class textbook's structure and design?

Q: When is comprehending test difficult for students?

Q: When are students more likely to possess well-developed knowledge structures or schemas that allow them to comprehend text at deep levels?

Q: Describe how active readers and learners use their prior knowledge as they interact with text to enhance their comprehension?

Q: How are the four critical dimensions outlined in Chapter 3 for meaning making and meaning used interrelated?

Q: How can teachers increase youths' comprehension abilities while honoring their outside of school literacies, interests, and competencies?

Q: Why is it important that content teachers base their instruction on the six guiding principles introduced in Chapter 2?

Q: The principle, Use Assessment as a Tool for Learning and Future Growth,guides teachers' assessment in an increasingly multicultural and multilingual print and other media.

Q: The principle, Connect Everyday Literacies and Funds of Knowledge with Academic Literacy and Learning, has its roots in cognitive and social constructivist notions of reading and learning.

Q: The influence of family, community, and peers does not play a major role in adolescents' academic motivation.

Q: Youth are not passive receptacles of facts and information, but they are active co-constructors of meaning.

Q: Today youth are developing the knowledge and skills necessary to compete in a global economy.

Q: In a recent survey, over 20% of teens in the United States said they use the Internet as the primary source for their school reports.

Q: When teachers' instructional decision making is guided by sound, evidence-based principles, they create supportive content area classrooms that help students from diverse cultures, language backgrounds, and abilities.

Q: The six principles presented in this book are directives or injunctions which must be strictly adhered to in adolescent literacy.

Q: Effective teaching is principled teaching which means that practices are grounded in evidence and ever-present in the thinking and planning of teachers for supporting content literacy and learning development for youth.

Q: Structuring classroom interactions so that youth have opportunities to learn from and with one another has contributed to higher student engagement in learning.

Q: What challenges are presented to teachers in an age in which ICT play an important role in the disciplinary classroom?

Q: Strong teacher-student relationships and respect for individual and cultural identities have a positive effect on learning engagement and achievement.

Q: Why does expanding and generating new understanding using information and communication technology important in today's classroom?

Q: With inclusion, growing numbers of youth are entering secondary content classrooms with ability levels that match the level of difficulty of the required texts.

Q: How can teacher ensure that students can identify the relative information and ideas from print and non-print sources?

Q: There is a direct relationship between reading scores and overall grade point average, as well as performance on standardized tests.

Q: What skills are vital for youth in understanding the volume of information available in today's world?

Q: Skill instruction in phonics has been shown to be most effective for older adolescent students.

Q: What do youth need in order to maneuver with competence through an increasingly complex information-based society?

Q: Striving readers are best served in pull-out programs and special classes.

Q: How can students to be authors of their own understanding and accessors of their own learning?

Q: A large number of preservice and inservice teachers are not regular, nor enthusiastic readers.

Q: What are the six principles that promote engaged reading and learning?

Q: Striving students in the middle and upper grades are more likely to choose to learn when they are respected as curricular informants and allowed a hand in determining course topics, materials, learning experiences, projects, and evaluation.

Q: How can teachers make principle-based instruction multidimensional?

Q: Today's teacher preparation and education program focuses on practices for youth who are striving readers.

Q: What do the authors mean by Funds of Knowledge?

Q: Students who are literate are proficient in locating and reading information from digitized sources, and can express themselves using e-mail, word processors and presentation programs as well as with handwriting.

Q: What are everyday literacies?

Q: Meeting the reading and learning needs of diverse groups of striving readers is an option and not a legal mandate and professional responsibility of all teachers.

Q: Describe effective teaching.

Q: For most of the adolescent population in the 1940s, schooling went no further than the 8thgrade.

Q: argue that "literacy pedagogy must now account for the burgeoning variety of text forms associated with information and multimedia technologies".

Q: Describe strategies that build reading competence for diverse learners.

Q: Adolescents develop a growing awareness of their membership in various discourse communities which they help define and which serve as in their burgeoning awareness of the world and of themselves.

Q: How can school offer striving readers comprehensive literacy programs?

Q: Adolescents are more likely to remain engaged readers and learners if their everyday experiences and are honored and made to enrich the classroom culture.

Q: Why is it important that teachers ensure that striving readers are viewed as a resource?

Q: The is a world saturated by inescapable, ever-evolving, and competing media that both flow through us and are altered and created by us.

Q: How do teachers determine whether reading strategies are appropriate for striving students and are based on sound theory and research?

Q: Census data reveal that over million people in the United States speak a language other than English at home.

Q: How can teachers begin to understand the literacy process? How can they stay abreast of all the new trends and developments in the fields of reading and writing?