An anticipation guide is a comprehension strategy teachers can use before and after reading and learning. This instructional tool is designed to activate students' prior knowledge and stimulate interest in upcoming reading material.

A double-entry journal (also referred to as a dialectical journal) is a reading strategy used during and after reading to support comprehension and deeper analysis. It can be used with both fiction and nonfiction texts. It includes selecting quotes and written reflection. This strategy encourages active reading, supports metacognition, and helps students engage more thoughtfully with the text.

Affix and morpheme chunking is a word-solving strategy that teaches students to break words into meaningful parts (prefixes, suffixes, and roots) to determine word meaning. This morphological awareness helps students make sense of unfamiliar vocabulary and supports both decoding and comprehension, particularly in content-area texts.

A gist statement is a concise summary that captures the essential meaning of a text. This strategy helps students distill key information, clarify understanding, and engage in deeper comprehension. Gist statements typically answer the questions: Who? What? When? Where? Why? and How? in a brief and meaningful way. When used regularly, this strategy strengthens reading comprehension, and teachers can review the gist statements to formatively assess comprehension.

A text feature walk is a comprehension strategy that teachers use to highlight specific components in an expository text. In this instructional strategy, students examine and discuss the various text features, such as titles, headings, subheadings, captions, graphs, and charts. This approach aims to activate prior knowledge, set a purpose for reading, and enhance comprehension by familiarizing students with the structure and key elements of the text. 

Reading guides are teacher-created tools that help students navigate a text by guiding their thinking and prompting active engagement while reading. These guides can direct attention to key ideas, support comprehension of complex content, and encourage deeper analysis. They are especially effective for supporting students in content areas where texts may be dense or unfamiliar.

A vocabulary map is a vocabulary building strategy teachers can use before and after reading. It provides an explicit and systematic approach to teach word knowledge, using student friendly definitions, illustrations, and practice opportunities.

A KLEWS chart contains some elements of a KWL chart, but adds a few other ideas to make it especially suitable for science. This comprehension tool teachers can use before, during and after reading. Like a KWL chart, it connects prior knowledge to current learning. The additional twist includes exploring evidence to support a claim and reinforcing scientific principles. 

3H is a mnemonic learning strategy that can assist reading comprehension and comprehension questions. It involves three types of question-answer relationships: here, hidden, and in my head. It is used before, during and after reading. 

Probable Passage is a pre-reading strategy designed to help students anticipate the structure and content of a passage by organizing selected vocabulary words into categories (e.g., characters, setting, problem, solution, etc.). Then students use those words to generate a prediction or a gist statement about the passage they are about to read. This approach builds students’ familiarity with vocabulary words and engages their inferential thinking. It also provides students with at least three opportunities to encounter the words (before, during, and after reading).

The question-answer relationship (QAR) reading comprehension strategy is a framework that teaches students how to analyze different types of questions and where to find their answers. It helps students become more strategic and independent when reading and responding to text. 

 A word splash is a collection of key terms, phrases, or concepts that are “splashed” randomly on a page or slide. These words are all connected to an upcoming topic, unit, or concept. Students preview the terms and make predictions about their meanings and how they might be connected. This strategy activates prior knowledge, promotes curiosity, and prepares students for learning new content. It can be used as a class discussion, small group activity, or individual task.

A pre-post journal is a reflective writing strategy that helps students activate prior knowledge before learning and consolidate their understanding afterward. Students respond to a prompt or question before engaging with new content. Then, they revisit the same prompt after instruction or reading to revise or expand their thinking. This strategy promotes metacognition and deepens comprehension by making learning visible over time. 

Pronoun resolution (also called anaphoric reference) is the skill of determining what a pronoun or referring expression (such as he, they, it, this) refers to in the text. This strategy helps students make sense of who or what is being discussed, especially when reading dense or abstract texts. Teaching students how to trace pronouns back to their antecedents improves coherence, strengthens comprehension, and supports clarity in their own writing.

An imagery walk is a strategy that helps students visualize and mentally rehearse key concepts, settings, or events before encountering a text or new learning. It invites students to create mental images using sensory language and guided prompts. This primes their imagination, activates prior knowledge, and improves comprehension by helping them "see" and "feel" the content before engaging with it more deeply. It's especially useful in narrative texts, historical events, or science concepts involving processes or environments.

The Frayer Model is a graphic organizer designed to help students deepen their understanding of complex vocabulary and concepts. It encourages students to think about words or ideas in multiple dimensions: definition, characteristics, examples, and non-examples. This strategy promotes conceptual understanding by making students analyze what a word or concept is and what it is not.

Teaching students to summarize informational text by focusing on text structure (such as cause/effect, problem/solution, or compare/contrast) is a strategy that improves comprehension and helps students organize their thinking. Recognizing how a text is structured provides a framework for understanding relationships between ideas, which is essential when writing accurate and concise summaries. This strategy works especially well with nonfiction but can also support understanding in fiction when identifying how events unfold or problems are resolved.

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