Virginia SOL 11.DSR.E
The Standard
Use reading strategies as needed to aid and monitor comprehension when encountering challenging sections of text. These sense-making strategies attend to text structure, common organizational structures, summarizing, asking questions of the text, and others (Reading Strategies, 3-12).
Virginia Standards of Learning for English · The student will build knowledge and comprehension skills from reading a range of challenging, content-rich texts. This includes fluently reading and gathering evidence from grade-level complex texts, reading widely on topics to gain purposeful knowledge and vocabulary, and using reading strategies when comprehension breaks down.
Teacher's field guide
What This Standard Means
What Students Need to Do
- Students notice when a challenging passage stops making sense and choose a strategy that fits the problem. They reread, ask questions, track the text’s structure, and summarize key ideas to restore understanding.
What Mastery Looks Like
- A student can identify the exact word, sentence, or structural shift causing confusion. The student applies a useful strategy, explains why it helped, and gives an accurate summary supported by details from the text.
Common Misconceptions
- Students often keep reading after meaning has broken down or restart the whole passage without naming the problem. They may mistake highlighting for comprehension, summarize minor details, or ask questions the text has already answered. Some use one strategy for every difficulty instead of matching the strategy to the problem.
How to Assess It
- Give students a 200-word dense paragraph. Ask them to underline one confusing point, name the strategy they used, and write a two-sentence summary.
Lesson moves
Ways to Teach It
Give pairs a printed complex paragraph to cut into sections, label each section’s role, reorder it, and justify the final structure.
After reading a difficult passage, have students write which sentence blocked understanding, why, and which strategy repaired meaning.
Run Strategy Relay: teams draw a card naming reread, summarize, question, or map structure, then apply it to a new paragraph.
Use a college policy, lease clause, or workplace email, and ask students to annotate confusing parts and produce a clear two-sentence explanation.
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