Reading Guide

The ability to read, interpret, and analyze a wide variety of texts is an important skill, not just for a student in a social studies classroom, but for any informed, engaged citizen. Therefore, reading texts is a critically important element of our courses, both for developing literacy skills and for providing wide-ranging content to meet a variety of standards and to present a truly global perspective.

Type of Texts in OER Project

Articles

Our most-common form of texts, articles represent the majority of the content in our course. These secondary sources are typically 1,000 to 1,500 words long, and are meant to provide an engaging narrative that helps students learn about key events, people, and concepts. All articles include visuals that provide additional context for readers. While most of the articles are written by a small group of OER Project historians, our author list includes more than 30 names.

Primary Source Collections

These curated, edited selections of primary and secondary sources are incorporated into all OER Project: World History (WH) courses. They’re accompanied the Quick Sourcing activity, a repeated activity to help students quickly analyze the texts. See a list of the collections here.

Graphic Biographies

These one-page graphic comics about everyday people throughout human history are meant to incorporate a variety of perspectives into the course and introduce students to narratives they wouldn’t learn about from a traditional textbook.

Data Explorations

Every data exploration begins with an introductory text that both introduces students to the charts included in that exploration and provides historical context. These articles were written in collaboration with Max Roser and the team at Our World in Data (OWID). (Learn more about OWID here: https://ourworldindata.org/.) Each data exploration centers on a selection of thematic charts from the OWID website.

The texts can be found by clicking on Topics in the navigation and scrolling to the Data Literacy page.

Three-Step Reading

There are many opportunities for reading in OER Project courses, and we use a broad definition of what it means to read. In today’s world, the reading skill set applies not just to articles and other traditional texts, but also to videos (click here for our Video Guide), data, graphic biographies, and other types of images and data representations. And at OER Project, we believe in close reading: students not only need to decode information, they need to understand the content deeply enough to apply it. We can’t achieve our goal of making history usable unless students are successfully navigating the entire progression of reading—from basic decoding to application. So, how do we help students read all this content closely? While we offer a variety of approaches, one approach you’ll see mentioned throughout our courses is Three-Step Reading, a practice that’s been borrowed from long-established methodologies and best practices for teaching reading. Students are introduced to this close-reading strategy early in all WH courses, and continue to use the process throughout.

Three-Step Reading is a helpful tool for gathering information from the various types of texts students will encounter in the course and in their research. Although it can be a difficult routine to establish in the classroom, it’s worth doing so, as research has clearly shown that it helps students excel. This formal approach is time-consuming at first, but students become faster and faster with each reading, and somewhere in the middle of the course they notice that three reads take about the same amount of time as reading once. Students will eventually internalize this process, and this reading routine will become second nature.

We have Three-Step Reading tools in the course to fit the different kinds of materials we offer (standard articles, graphic biographies, data); however, the same principles apply to all three. The first step for reading is essentially a skim, one that orients students to what they’re about to dig into. The second step is more detailed, and is designed to ensure students are picking up the key ideas. The third step goes the deepest, as it pushes students to think about how the text supports, extends, or challenges what they already know. It also helps them apply what they’re learning. So, while specifics of the approach change depending upon the material being “read,” the concept of three steps applies across the board.

For additional reading strategies, check out our Differentiating, Modifying, and Adapting OER Project Materials guide.

Reading Supports

We offer a few additional resources to help students unpack the course texts.

We’ve partnered with Newsela to provide multiple Lexile levels of all our OER Project articles, thus ensuring that readers with a wide range of abilities can access the texts. Please note that only the highest Lexile level is provided in WH AP® (this is to ensure the course meets the requirements for serving as a college textbook). Some articles are also offered in Spanish (at the highest Lexile level only).

We even have an audio version of each article (based on the highest Lexile level of the article), which can be used for the first read, or a skim, or which can be used as a scaffold to help students who are struggling with reading.

Here are some general principles for using audio versions in the classroom that we suggest you consider before diving in with your students:

1. Match audio to text
   • Students can often understand something aurally that they can’t understand via text alone. Best practices point to using the highest difficulty level, so that’s what we did—we recorded onlythe highest Lexile version of each text. Make sure your students have the right text (that is, the highest Lexile version) in front of them if they’re reading along while listening.
2. Follow along!
   • This can be hard for students, but if they aren’t matching the audio to the words on paper or screen, they’re not getting the full benefit. For students who need the audio support, have them follow along using a pen or pencil as a pointer, and check in with them while they follow along, discreetly getting them back to the right spot if they’ve lost their place.
3. Listening ≠ reading
   • Listening alone equates to more of a skim, which is the first read in the Three-Step Reading process. Therefore, you might want to allow students to “listen” for their first of the three reads.
   • Aural comprehension is generally about 20% of reading comprehension—this according to a number of studies that have tried to determine how much people understand and retain when they listen to an audio recording of a text versus actually reading that text.
4. Management can be tricky
   • Before you use audio with your students, consider whether you’re using it for an entire class or for individual students:
   • If individual students, ensure you have enough headphones so students can listen along. Check in periodically with students if they’re using headphones—it can be easy for them to get lost.
   • If using whole-class audio, ensure students know to follow along, and agree on a way for them to signal to you if they get lost. Students who need extra reading supports are often self- conscious about it, so for some students, you might want to find a discreet signal.

Vocabulary

We’d be remiss if we didn’t mention vocabulary in this guide. Vocabulary building is vital to supporting the work students do in our courses—and it’s especially important in helping students develop their reading muscles. While it may seem simple or elementary, we must emphasize that without a solid grasp of vocabulary, we create a barrier to a student’s accessing, understanding, and applying the knowledge they need to do the work of a historian. A routine focus on vocabulary is a small practice that will go a very long way. For more, head over to the Vocabulary Guide.