QAR Specific Reading Strategy: How to Use it in the Classroom

Teachers are now often faced with going beyond traditional teaching and are given a list of ideas and strategies to use with their classes. As a fairly new teacher, I have found that the list of strategies may be great, but no one bothers to go into details about how to use the specific strategies. When I write educational articles, I not only focus on their importance for teachers, but also for parents who home school their children, or spend additional time helping their children with homework. Any of these strategies can be used at home, once parents learn how. So this is the first of a series of articles about how to use specific reading strategies. The first reading strategy to be reviewed and explained is the QAR, or Question, Answer, Relationship strategy.

QAR is a strategy that relates questions with the text, using the reader's background knowledge or direct context clues and information included in the text being read. QAR stands for Question, Answer, and Relationship. The premise of the strategy is that there are four types of questions that need to be asked when reading a text. T he four questions types are think and search, right there, author and you, and on my own. This is where the education for teachers on how to use the strategy often ends.

First of all, it is important to find an easy to use version of the QAR strategy. One can be found at http://www.greece.k12.ny/us/instruction/ela/6-12/tools/QAR.pdf

]www.greece.k12.ny/us/instruction/ela/6-12/tools/QAR.pdf. Not only are you provided with a blank copy to be used by students, but a teachers copy is included with ach section filled in with instructions and further elaborations about each of the four types of questions found on a QAR strategy sheet. If you do not have access to a computer, you can create the QAR form by simply folding a paper into four squares. The heading for each of the four squares is of course each of the four types of QAR questions.

It is helpful to know what each type of question is asking the students to find. The first type of question or right there, is asking students to look for answers that are directly in the text. The answer is stated overtly somewhere in the passage. The second type of question, or think and search, require a student to link information within the text. The information may be located in more than one spot, such as in the text in different places, on graphs or maps. The third type of question or on my own, are questions that requires the student to use information that they already know in order to answer the question. These types of questions often appear with the beginning, 'In your opinion," "what do you think" The fourth type of question is probably the hardest for students to understand and is the author and me type of question. The Author and me question does not state the answer directly in the text. It is basically using information implied and gathered from reading the entire text. An example of this might be that students have read a history section on World War 2. The article would cover the facts of the war, such as numbers of deaths and economic hardships imposed by war. The author and me question might ask, "Do you think war is a positive or a negative thing from what you know and what you have read."

Here is how the QAR strategy is used. First of all, a reading passage is selected appropriate to the student's reading level. I always advise to find something either on grade level or a grade or so above so the student will be challenged. The strategy is of course used after reading. The form can be used in one of two ways. The teacher can either create a question for each of the four categories and have students find the answers or she can ask the students to create a question for each category and answer it. When the strategy is introduced it is best if the teacher creates the questions and walks the students through using the strategy. I have found that after a few practices, students usually can create their own questions and answer them successfully. Another creative use of the QAR is to have students create their own questions for the teacher to collect the sheets then pass them out to random students. That way, they are answering someone else's questions. This provides additional practice.

This strategy comes in handy to teach students to look for deeper meaning in texts. It also helps them to understand main idea better. I have found that by understanding the four basic types of questions, students' comprehension increase and they score significantly better on tests in the future.