Effective readers use pictures, titles, headings, and text—as well as personal experiences—to make predictions before they begin to read. Predicting involves thinking ahead while reading and anticipating information and events in the text. After making predictions, students can read through the text and refine, revise, and verify their predictions.
The strategy of making predictions actively engages students and connects them to the text by asking them what they think might occur in the story. Using the text, students refine, revise, and verify their thinking and predictions.
Making predictions activates students’ prior knowledge about the text and helps them make connections between new information and what they already know. By making predictions about the text before, during, and after reading, students use what they already know—as well as what they suppose might happen—to make connections to the text.
Snow (1998) has found that throughout the early grades, reading curricula should include explicit instruction on strategies used to comprehend text either read to the students or that students read themselves. These strategies include summarizing the main idea, predicting events or information to which the text is leading, drawing inferences, and monitoring for misunderstandings.
Teachers should begin modeling the strategy of making predictions regularly with young students, and they should continue using this strategy throughout elementary and middle school—until students have integrated the strategy into their independent reading.
Model how to make predictions for emergent readers. The “think-aloud” strategy, is particularly helpful.
As students move toward independent integration of the strategy, teachers should provide opportunities for them to make, revise, and verify their own predictions before, during, and after reading. Here are some suggestions:
As students become proficient in making predictions, they can start using the Direct Reading-Thinking Activity (DR-TA) strategy, which guides students in making predictions about a text and then reading to confirm or refute their predictions. Students justify their predictions, discuss or write their explanations, and make new predictions based specific evidence from the text. Students can also determine whether predictions came from their own prior knowledge and which predictions were based on evidence from the text.
Use the prediction strategy when introducing new picture books to primary students or new chapter books to older students. With young students, read the book aloud making predictions as a class or a group and reading to confirm the predictions. With chapter books, have students make predictions at the start of each chapter so that their predictions draw from the chapters they have already read. Have students make predictions based on other books they have read by the same author or other books they have read in the same genre. After reading, discuss the text and any information that helped verify or caused them to revise their predictions.
After students read a text or passage using the prediction strategy, have them write a summary of their initial prediction and why it was correct or needed to be modified. Students can justify their ideas based on evidence from the text.
Another activity to use when teaching predicting is to have students write the first part of a story and then trade stories with a partner and continue that partner’s story, anticipating future events and the story’s resolution.
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