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Kentucky Teacher Shares Strategies for
Teaching Comprehension Questions
Part 5: Short-Answer Question
Comprehension Questions Bookmark
To help remind students of these strategies for answering the comprehension questions, download and print a free Comprehension Questions Bookmark for your students.
The bookmark can help students focus on what is required to answer each type of question correctly.
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Continuing our series on teaching the comprehension questions, this month we provide a strategy for teaching students to answer the short-answer questions.
Most Read Naturally stories include five common types of comprehension questions: main idea, literal, vocabulary, inferential, and short answer. It is important for students to understand the different types of questions and have strategies to answer them.
Angela Walker Foster from Anderson County Schools in Lawrenceburg, KY has provided a great instructional strategy for teaching the comprehension questions, and we're pleased to share the strategy with you.
Short answer: A person should be able to understand what question was asked by reading only the answer. Always restate the question in your answer.
- Choose five stories at a readability level that most students in your group can read. Give each student the same five stories. Display what short answer means and then highlight the key words you want the students to remember: restate the question.
- Spend a moment asking the students some simple questions, and require them to restate the question in their answers. Explain that they will need to do the same thing with the short answer questions. For example: Question: What is your brother’s name? Answer: My brother’s name is Billy.
- Read the first story with them out loud.
- After the story, examine the short answer question. Pick out the key words from the question that will need to be included in the answer.
- Help the students cross out words that are not needed in the answer (i.e., question words like what, when, and how). Also, help the students add words that are needed to make the answer sound correct (i.e., words like because and is).
- Then as a group, write out the answer. Be sure to restate the question within the answer.
- Repeat steps 3–6 with the second story. The goal is for students to understand how to phrase the answer. This is a think-out-loud exercise.
- Have the students try it themselves on the third story.
- Talk about the answers after they restate the question on their own.
- Repeat steps 8–9 for the fourth story.
- Use the fifth story as an assessment to determine if the students understand how to correctly restate the question in the answer. If they are still unable to write the answer correctly, choose a few more stories to practice as a group. As with any new lesson, some students will need more practice and instruction than other students.
This concludes the series on teaching the comprehension questions. Please use the following links to revisit the lesson plans for the different types of questions:
Part 1: Teaching the Main-Idea Question
Part 2: Teaching the Literal Question
Part 3: Teaching the Vocabulary Question
Part 4: Teaching the Inferential Question
