Supporting Students in Close Reading

Authors: Barbara Jones, Sandy Chang, Margaret Heritage, AND Glory Tobiason

National Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards, and Student Testing University of California, Los Angeles Graduate School of Education & Information Studies

This resource is organized as a series of steps that teachers can follow as they prepare for close reading. These steps include: (1) Gaining an understanding of close reading; (2) Selecting appropriate texts to use with students; (3) Priming text: Reading the selected text multiple times to (a) annotate text to gain increased understanding of the text and (b) extract and record relevant information from the text; (4) Developing text-dependent questions to stimulate student thinking and discussion of the text; (5) Using evidence gathered from the close reading process to inform instructional next steps (formative assessment).

Please read Supporting Students in Close Reading Links to an external site. and think about how the steps outlined in this resource can be applied to the close reading of historical documents in social studies classes.

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