FRAME OF REFERENCE

Targeted Skills:

• Relate new information to prior reading and/or experience

• Understand relationships between texts and their historical, social and cultural contexts

• Make, confirm, or revise predictions

• Analyzing the historical context of a document or perspective

What is it?

When skilled readers approach the reading of a fiction or nonfiction text, they automatically summon up prior knowledge of any information or experience that will provide a foundation and/or context for the text. One of the ways we can explicitly teach our students this strategy is to have them consciously create a framework for their reading. When readers create these connections, it engages them right from the beginning and helps them to deepen their understanding. This strategy asks the reader to summon what they know about the topic, place, event, or issue and to think about how they know that information. Taking a critical look at how we gather our knowledge on a topic is an important step in evaluating its depth and validity.

What does it look like?

Frame of Reference is a graphic organizer that helps students to access prior knowledge as well as the sources by which they gathered that knowledge. This visual mimics the structure of how a photograph or drawing might be "framed." The small diagram below illustrates the blank template. When used as a pre-reading activity, the topic, event or issue is labeled in the center; a student’s notes on what they know about that topic are written (in single words or phrases) inside the interior rectangle, and how the student gathered that information is (the people, texts, events that influenced their thinking) in the outer rectangle. When used as a during reading strategy, students take notes on salient information on the topic; they write their personal reactions and what they know about the topic on the outer frame.

How could I use, adapt or differentiate it?

• For homework, students can choose 3 or 4 of the questions to answer to illustrate their understanding of the reading.

• Once students have generated questions in response to a text, consider having them work with a partner to categorize the kinds of questions they have posed (e.g., knowledge, understanding, application, analysis, synthesis, evaluation) using the collaborative questions graphic organizer and then work with their partner to answer the questions they have posed.

• A great closure activity for a full-length text is to ask individual students to develop questions for homework (e.g., two content questions and two writer’s craft questions that remain “unanswered” for them). Collect them the next day for compilation. On the following day, distribute a list of all of the questions to the class and have small groups or the large group choose the questions that strike a chord with the group and answer them in small or large group discussions.

• Or, from a compiled list, for homework, students can choose 3 or 4 of the questions to answer to illustrate their understanding of the reading and/or as a springboard for discussion the next day. Students can choose a question that intrigues them and develop a writing prompt or a thesis statement that they defend by gathering evidence from the text to support it.

From the Greece Central School District, Department of Curriculum and Instruction, English Language Arts Page, Reading Strategies available at http://web000.greece.k12.ny.us/instruction/ela/6-12/Reading/Reading%20Strategies/frameofreference.htm

Examples: 

Frame of Reference example endangered species.doc

Frame of Reference-Medieval Manor.docx

Frame of Reference Declaration of Independence.docx

Frame of Reference US Homefront Race Relations WWII.docx

Frame of Reference Reconstruction(1).docx