Building Reading Proficiency at the Secondary Level: A Guide to Resources

What is it? How does it work?

Background:
Extends Ogle's (1986) K-W-L strategy to secondary readers. The questions What do I know? (K), What do I want to know? (W), and What did I learn? (L) are supported with summarizing and mapping.

Overview:
Carr and Ogle's (1987) K-W-L-Plus, for Know, Want, and Learn plus Mapping and Summarizing, guides secondary students through five reading strategies. It extends Ogle's (1986) K-W-L strategy to secondary readers. Ogle claims K-W-L helps students become better readers of expository text and helps teachers to be more interactive in their teaching. After several K-W-L-Plus activities, students are encouraged to use it as an independent learning strategy. The steps are as follows:

Step K - What do I know? Before students read, the teacher presents a concept from the text and poses the "Know" question. As the class brainstorms, the teacher lists responses on a strategy sheet beginning with a column labeled "K - What we know." Students and teacher categorize this list into information they predict will be in the text. The teacher becomes aware of students' level of prior knowledge.
Step W - What do I want to learn? The teacher elicits student questions stemming from their interests, curiosities, or unanswered questions about the concept. These are listed on the strategy sheet under a column labeled "W - W hat do I want to learn." Students read sections of the passage individually (broken into manageable segments for struggling readers) and check for answers to the questions. During reading, additional questions can be added and answered as a group.
Step L1 - What Did I learn? Both during and after reading, students write what they learned in a third column "L - W hat I learned" and check which questions were unanswered.
Step L2 - Mapping. Students refer to the K step to categorize what they learned. Placing the title at the center of the map, they form categories as major branches, and add explanatory concepts. Students can refer to the map to create exam or study questions.
Step L3 - Summarizing. Students number the concepts on the map based to order points they choose to make in a written summary. The summaries become a useful summative evaluation for teacher and student as they evaluate their comprehending.

Variations on the theme of K-W-L-Plus
Huffman (1998) combined K-W-L with the "5W" questions. Mandeville (1994) advocated adding an additional column, allowing students to assign relevance and personal value to what is being learned. An effective implementation of K-W-L is teacher modeling, student practice in groups, and independent use by students in a co-requisite course (Stone & Miller, 1991).