Virginia SOL 9.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 recognize when a difficult passage no longer makes sense. They use clues from the text’s structure, pause to summarize, ask questions, reread, or annotate until they can explain the meaning.
What Mastery Looks Like
- Students notice when a passage stops making sense and choose a useful response, such as rereading, asking a question, or mapping the structure. They can explain how that move clarified the passage and support their understanding with details from the text.
Common Misconceptions
- Students may keep reading after meaning is lost or assume rereading alone will fix confusion. They may name a text structure without using it to follow the author’s ideas. Some summaries include minor details but miss the main point.
How to Assess It
- Give students one dense paragraph and ask them to mark where meaning became unclear, name the strategy they used, and write a one-sentence summary.
Lesson moves
Ways to Teach It
Give pairs a cut-up article to arrange by text structure, then have them label signal words and explain their choices.
After reading a difficult paragraph, students write one question for the author and explain which sentence caused the question.
Play Strategy Match by giving groups confusion scenarios and cards labeled reread, summarize, annotate, question, and map the structure.
Use a job manual or phone contract excerpt, and have students annotate the steps they use to understand one dense section.
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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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