Virginia SOL 12.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 where their understanding breaks down and identify what caused the problem. They choose a strategy, such as chunking, questioning, summarizing, or mapping the text’s organization, then check whether it worked.
What Mastery Looks Like
- Students can identify the exact sentence or idea causing confusion and choose a useful response. They can explain the text’s organization, ask productive questions, and summarize the passage accurately.
Common Misconceptions
- Students often reread without changing their approach or checking whether meaning improves. They may confuse the topic with the text’s organization, or copy details instead of summarizing the main claim and reasoning.
How to Assess It
- Give students one unfamiliar, challenging paragraph. Ask them to mark where meaning became unclear, name the strategy they used, and write a two-sentence summary.
Lesson moves
Ways to Teach It
Give pairs a cut-up complex essay, then have them reconstruct it and label clues that reveal comparison, cause, or problem-solution structure.
After a difficult paragraph, students write one question, one two-sentence summary, and the strategy that helped them resolve confusion.
Run a strategy sort: teams match confusing passages with rereading, annotation, questioning, chunking, or structure mapping, then defend each choice.
Students annotate a college policy or workplace handbook page, identify its organization, and summarize the action a reader must take.
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Use reading strategies as needed to aid and monitor comprehension when encountering challenging sections of text. These sense-making strategies attend to common...
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