Using Anticipatory Reading Guides to Improve Elementary Students’

One of the greatest challenges of an elementary school teacher is equipping
students with comprehension strategies that transfer to all content areas. With
stable levels of reading achievement over the last two decades in the United
States, it is necessary that further research be conducted on methods of increasing
students’ comprehension proficiencies. This experimental research study explores
the use of an anticipatory reading guide with third grade struggling readers across
multiple subject areas. Findings indicate that the experimental treatment group
outperformed the control group by a statistically significant rate on both reading
and content area measures, indicating that when struggling readers practice and
use strategies to explicitly think what will be asked of them after reading the
passage they perform at higher levels.