Introduction
Graphic organizers help students in many content areas organize and understand what they are reading. However, some students need continued help in their reading comprehension skills. Bethune and Wood (2013) have found that by using a wh-question graphic organizer, students with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), and other learning disabilities; will improve their reading accuracy skills. In addition, focusing on literal wh-questions improves students’ abilities to answer direct questions about passages they just read.
Summary
Bethune and Wood (2013) gathered past studies involving reading comprehension deficits in students with ASD and found that many students still struggled with correctly answering direct questions about information they just read. Their research showed that graphic organizers have been successful in helping students’ organizer their thoughts while reading. In addition, they concluded that graphic organizers would be a useful choice in helping students with Autism recall information they just read because prior research supports it. Bethune and Wood (2013) decided to set up a study where three individuals with ASD use a graphic organizer with specific wh-questions about passages of text they just read. The four types of questions given to the three participants where: who? (person), where? (place), what? (thing), and what doing? (event). Researchers instructed teachers to fold the graphic organizer into four equal boxes on an eight and half by eleven-inch paper. Each box contained a bold label for each type of wh-question. Students learned to fill in each box with as many keywords as they could about the passage they just read, before instructors asked two comprehension questions for each category.
After using the graphic organizers with the wh-questions, the participants showed an increase in their ability to answer comprehension questions after reading each passage of text. The three participants all were able to answer six to eight wh-questions correctly right after reading their passage of text compared to only three to four wh-correctly before the intervention. The participants all exhibited maintenance after three to five weeks after the intervention was stopped. Bethune and Wood (2013) suggest that students with learning disabilities and ASD will benefit from using graphic organizers with wh-questions because students are able to organize their thoughts about what they just read by answering questions about who, where, what thing and what event took place in the passage.
Implications
Using wh-question graphic organizers allows instructors to help students organize what they just read about a passage of text easily. Students use the graphic organizer to answer simple, literal questions about what is happening in the passage and make clear statements about the main idea and important details in the text. This is an important strategy for instructors to use because many students struggle with reading accuracy skills.
Instructors can also use the wh-question graphic organizer as an informal assessment tool their students’ reading comprehension skills. Instructors will see how well the students’ answer the comprehension questions of who, where, what thing and what event, and can make instructional decisions on whether that students need more instruction on how to pull out important information from text. In addition, this is an important tool for instructors to use as a progress-monitoring tool to record a student’s improvement in answering comprehension questions.