NEW Practice Guides

The What Works Clearinghouse has issued two new practice guides, with practical recommendations for educators to help them address the challenges they face in their classrooms and schools. “Improving Reading Comprehension in Kindergarten Through Third-Grade” recommends five specific steps that teachers, reading coaches, and principals can take to improve reading comprehension for young readers: teach students how to use reading comprehension strategies; teach students to identify and use the text’s organizational structure to comprehend, learn, and remember content; guide students through focused, high-quality discussion on the meaning of text; select texts to support comprehension development; and establish an engaging and motivating context within which to teach reading comprehension. “Developing Effective Fractions Instruction for Kindergarten Through Eighth-Grade” recommends five strategies to help educators improve students’ understanding of fractions: build on students’ informal understanding of sharing and proportionality to develop initial faction concepts; help students recognize that fractions are numbers and that they expand the number system beyond whole numbers; help students understand why procedures for computations with fractions make sense; develop students’ conceptual understanding of the strategies for solving ratio, rate, and proportion problems before exposing them to cross-multiplication as a procedure to use to solve such problems; and set a priority on improving teachers’ understanding of fractions and how to teach them. Each practice guide recommendation includes a summary of supporting research, implementation strategies, and potential roadblocks and solutions.