Middle School Grades 6-8

Six Traits of Effective Readers

The following six traits of effective readers help teachers pinpoint what they should be seeing in middle school and high school readers. The six traits of an effective reader (the discrete skill areas that identify what good readers do)—are:

1. Decoding conventions of writing, organization, and genre. Advanced students are able to recognize correct grammatical constructions, understand the function of punctuation, and have an awareness of spelling conventions. They can identify the title, author, and components of the text, such as the table of contents and chapter headings. And they can identify the genre.
2. Establishing comprehension. Students can state or write a thesis statement; name major and minor examples of the thesis; identify the turning moments with facts and examples; and connect the turning points to the main thesis.
3. Realizing context. Students can use examples from the text to discuss the author’s intentions and inferred meanings, both implicit and explicit.
4. Developing interpretation. Students can identify problems in texts and resolve them using clues and evidence.
5. Integrating for synthesis. Students can connect text with other texts, subjects, and experiences.
6. Critiquing for evaluation. Students can, with insight and evidence, critique ideas and perspectives found in the reading.

Source: Toolkit98 is designed to assist classroom teachers to become better assessors of student learning. http://www.nwrel.org/nwreport/oct98/article1.html

Improving the Middle Grades: Actions That Can Be Taken Now

The following six steps are recommended by "Making Middle Schools Work" to strengthen middle grades education. Although they are general, they apply to literacy achievement as well.

• Get the mission right. Set out to prepare students for challenging work in high school.
• Define what students need to know and be able to do to be ready for high school.
• Set high but reasonable standards for student performance.
• Provide lagging students with extra time and extra help.
• Get more good principals, in part by changing the focus of existing programs for preparing principals.
• Get more good teachers, in part by changing licensure rules to require all middle grades teachers to have a solid grounding in the subjects they will teach.

(Source: http://www.sreb.org/programs/MiddleGrades/publications/publicationsindex.asp)