To monitor comprehension, students must have ways to check how their understanding of the material is at different times throughout a reading, such as after each chapter. One primary way to have children monitor their comprehension is to have them stop reading during the middle of a story to answer questions. If they cannot answer the questions, then the children are having a problem with their comprehension and must reread the story up to that point. This can teach children to slow down when they read and to use other techniques to monitor comprehension, for example, reading out loud.
Teach children to visualize events, characters and other parts of the story while reading. This helps children make mental images in their head about the various parts of the story and according to the Reading Rocket, it can actually help children remember events of stories better. Teach children to develop pictures in their head about any event or character in the book. As a child does this, the story often comes to life and, therefore, has a greater impact on the child.
Some teachers use Venn diagrams to improve reading comprehension in students. A Venn diagram is a visual representation, which allows students to point out similarities and differences between two concepts, such as two different books. To create a Venn diagram, draw an oval on a piece of paper. Draw another oval that overlaps the first one. Where the ovals overlap, have the students write similarities of the books. On the other parts of the ovals, have them write the differences in books. This technique causes students to think about what they are reading and make connections between two things.
Evaluating and synthesizing are interconnected ways to teach comprehension. Evaluating is the process students learn to assess an entire story by looking for its overall importance or meaning. To teach this, students must learn how to look at a complete work and determine why the author wrote it and what he was trying to get across. Synthesizing is very similar to evaluating because it also looks at the whole picture instead of parts of the whole. Synthesizing varies from evaluating in terms of the purpose for which it is used. Evaluating looks at what the author is saying while synthesizing is designed to have a reader involve her own thoughts on the text to create new ideas or opinions of what she personally acquired from the reading.