Counseling Education

Is that true - Study Guides Improve Text Comprehension?

Nowadays, there are plenty of study guides to get inspired from, and students may sometimes deal with difficulties when it comes to choosing the perfect one. However, you should know that despite the large number of options, all of them are based on the same theoretical assumptions. Study guides are designed to offer guidance to students who want to have a better understanding of text materials.

A good study guide should be created to accomplish two goals: help students discover the main ideas of a text, and guide them through both the thinking and reading ideas that are necessary to make that discovery. In other words, study guides provide models of how teachers think while they read a text, thus serving as comprehension models. Besides, they have the ability to help students deal with difficult vocabulary and achieve a higher level of thinking.

Teachers play an important role in the development of their students, meaning that they should be the first ones to provide students with study guides. These guides can be divided into interlocking and non-interlocking study guides. The first category deals with the relationships between the three comprehension levels: literal, interpretive, applicative, while the second one is designed to help students achieve a higher level of thinking.

Study guides improve text comprehension by allowing students to make choices, producing responses that can never be considered incorrect, requesting personal feelings, soliciting evaluation and encouraging speculation. This means that texts are basically a dialogue between authors and readers, and can have more than one interpretation. Text comprehension implies the ability to participate in a dialogue, by making use of your own judgment and experience.

One of the most important questions related to study guides is whether they can facilitate the comprehension of a text. The answer is that they can, being one of the best ways of helping students improve their skills when it comes to text analysis. Apart from the two categories of study guides described above, there is a third one, which consists of study guides constructed by teachers. However, they are usually used in classrooms all the time, since teachers constantly share their knowledge with their students.

Study guides not only help students understand certain texts, but they also help them improve their test scores. These instructional aides have gained a lot of popularity in the recent period, especially in educational systems where the accent is laid on practical competences more than on theoretical approaches. Every study guide used in classrooms should be chosen based on the teacher’s directions and decisions. As a result, teachers should have in mind the objectives of their lessons before turning to a study guide or creating their own. Bear in mind that these guides are not compulsory for every chapter of a text, since they are designed to assist only with texts that are difficult to understand. However, specialists agree that study guides are not very effective without teachers’ directions, as they are not designed to work as independent seatwork. 

It’s useful to have a study guide at hand whenever you deal with a difficult text whose comprehension raises some problems. Whenever you find yourself in this type of situation, you can opt for one of the large number of study guides available on the internet. These guides can help you increase text comprehension, as well as offer you some useful tips related to the reading process. However, study guides do not guarantee that difficult texts will be immediately understood, since they offer only some basic tips, not solutions that can be applied in all types of circumstances.

Specialists mention that the efficiency of these guides usually depends on the direction and decisions provided by teachers. When you need to improve your comprehension skills, study guides will definitely come in handy, as long as you use them as additional instruction tools. Nevertheless, you should bear in mind that your comprehension level is usually influenced by your mood and by previous experiences.

As a result, you should not be surprised when you repeat the reading of a text after several months, and find out that the main ideas you extract are different from the ones you discovered during the first reading.

Author Bio: Davis Miller wrote the article. He is an education writer who has intense knowledge in education field. His site http://www.yorknotes.com/ is also to help teachers to help their students reach their full potential.