Highlighting Skills to Improve Comprehension
Teaching Children How to Highlight as They Read
Oct 23, 2008
The question about highlighter skills is not whether to teach them, but when to teach them. Highlighter skills are useful towards helping students improve reading comprehension and learn good study habits. Think carefully about what text to have the students read and what highlighting skills to teach them.
Highlighter Skills to Improve Reading Comprehension
Highlighting will help to promote better reading comprehension. Students who highlight as they read are learning to identify the important points, and are paying close attention to what they are reading so that they highlight the appropriate text. Focusing on the text in this way enables greater learning and deeper comprehension.
Highlighting also helps both visual and tactile students remember what they are reading and will aid in studying the text independently. For visual learners, the highlighted portions of text will stick in their heads better as a visual reminder of the important facts in the text. For tactile learners, the physical act of highlighting helps them to remember the important facts.
Picking a Text to Highlight
When choosing a text to teach highlighter skills, think carefully about the students' reading level. The text should be at an independent reading level for all students, so that the act of reading is not the focus of the activity. It may be prudent to choose a text that is written a grade level below where your students are currently reading, and that includes more than one paragraph.
Teaching Highlighting Skills
When deciding what to teach students to highlight, think through the things you would highlight when studying a college text book. Students need to look for the main idea, key points, and any other important information. Ask students to think about what information might end up on a test, and highlight that.
Teach students to not highlight an entire paragraph. Look for and highlight new information. They need not highlight even an entire sentence if only part of the information is important.
When going back to study a highlighted text for a test, teach students to read the highlighted parts and not the entire text again. The point of highlighting is to remember where the most important pieces of information are found within the body of the text.
Students as young as second grade can learn how to use a highlighter when reading an informative text. Proactively teach highlighting skills, and do not expect a child to understand what is important to highlight, even if he is able to articulate the key facts in the story.
Learn more tips for improving reading comprehension and fluency.
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