QAR: Enhancing Comprehension and Test Taking Across Grades and Content Areas

Teachers today face increasing demands to ensure their students achieve high levels of literacy. They may feel overwhelmed by the challenges of teaching reading comprehension strategies that foster the integration, interpretation, critique, and evaluation of text ideas. The challenges are compounded because students of diverse backgrounds often enter classrooms reading far below grade level. In this article, the authors describe how Question-Answer Relationships (QARs) can provide a framework for comprehension instruction with the potential of closing the literacy achievement gap. QAR can serve as a starting point for addressing four problems of practice that stand in the way of moving all students to high levels of literacy: The need for a shared language to make visible the invisible processes underlying reading and listening comprehension The need for a framework for organizing questioning activities and comprehension instruction within and across grades and school subjects The need for accessible and straightforward whole-school reform for literacy instruction for higher level thinking The need to prepare students for high-stakes testing without undermining a focus on higher level thinking with text.