Helping Your Complex Learner Get The GIST
As a parent of a Complex Learner, you may already be familiar with the struggles that can go hand-in-hand with reading for many students. While various learning profiles might make reading difficult, it can also make the comprehension piece challenging, as well. Comprehension is critical when it comes to reading and educational success. We spoke with Learning Specialists, Sue Halvarson and Meg Silva to learn more about comprehension and a helpful tool you can use at home to help your child.
What Is Comprehension?
Comprehension is the understanding and interpretation of what is read. As Reading Rockets shares, to be able to understand written material accurately, children need to be able to:
- Decode what they read
- Make connections between what they read and what they already know
- Think deeply about what they read
Comprehension and the Complex Learner
Comprehension is important for every child but can be more of a struggle for Complex Learners when there are language processing and production challenges as well as difficulty with processing and retaining information.
As Complex Learners, our students need an explicit, sequential, structured, cumulative, multisensory approach to learning. This strengthens comprehension because it provides the tools to decode and recognize words, which lays a critical foundation for understanding the meaning of sentences, paragraphs, and entire texts.
Improving Comprehension With the GIST
As a parent, you want to do all you can to support your child’s learning and development but when it comes to reading and comprehension, it can feel confusing and overwhelming. What can you be doing at home to help your child develop this critical skill?
While there are many ways to support comprehension, today we’ll be focusing on a reading comprehension strategy called the GIST, which is an acronym for Generate Interactions between Schemata and Text. It is a summarization strategy that helps students understand complex text. The purpose is to focus on the main ideas of the text and synthesize information.
By synthesizing the information, students are able to comprehend, retain, and recall information they gleaned from the story. By giving students the task of identifying the most important information next to the text (e.g. who, what, where, when, why), they are able to take the information gleaned and put it into their own words in a phrase or a sentence.
Using The GIST
To help illustrate this technique, we took a K-5 story and broke each paragraph down by using the GIST to identify the most important information. Take a look below to see our summary!
By summarizing each paragraph, students are able to break down the information they read and put it into their own words. To try this technique at home, have your child pick out a story or use a book they’re reading in school. As you’re reading it together, create a GIST with your child. After a paragraph, pause and work with your child to summarize what was just read. Check out this graphic organizer to help you get started! For younger children, have them draw a picture next to each paragraph to help lessen the language demands.
Try out using the GIST with your child and share your experience in the comments below!
When you help your Complex Learner uncover their own love of reading, you’re unlocking a whole new world for them to explore! Want to get notified when there’s a new World of Complex Learners blog post?