Virginia SOL 8.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 difficult section stops making sense. They use text structure, rereading, questions, annotations, or summaries to rebuild meaning and check their understanding.
What Mastery Looks Like
- A student can pinpoint where understanding failed and select a useful repair strategy. The student can identify the text’s organization, ask relevant questions, and summarize the section accurately.
Common Misconceptions
- Students may reread the whole passage without naming what confused them or changing their approach. They may copy sentences instead of summarizing, or identify signal words without explaining the text’s organization.
How to Assess It
- Give students a dense 200-word passage. Ask them to mark one confusing spot, apply a named strategy, identify the structure, and write a two-sentence summary.
Lesson moves
Ways to Teach It
Give pairs a cut-up cause-and-effect article; they reorder paragraphs, circle signal words, and explain how the structure supports meaning.
Pause after a dense paragraph and ask, “Where did meaning break down, and which strategy helped you repair it?”
Play Strategy Match: teams pair confusion cards with reread, annotate, question, summarize, or text structure cards, then justify each match.
Have students rewrite a confusing school policy paragraph as a clear three-sentence guide for a new student.
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Printable 8.DSR.E Worksheet
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- 4.DSR.E
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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