Critical Reading Worksheet Answer Key

[Klaudia Aricas]

Criticalthinking starts with critical reading. By learning to ask questions and engage more deeply with the texts they read in school, students will gain lifelong skills that will help them think more analytically about the world around them.

Put another way, critical reading asks students to not just absorb the words on the page but to interact with them and engage in a conversation with an author by asking questions, interrogating ideas, and dissecting arguments.

One easy way to tell if a student is reading a text critically is to look at the condition of whatever they are reading. Are the pages dogeared? Are passages underlined or highlighted? Are there notes in the margins? If the answer is yes, that means your student is an active reader as opposed to a passive reader who simply reads the words on a page without actually digesting the ideas.

When a student simply reads, they get a basic understanding of the text, absorbing key facts, and generally assuming that the author is correct in whatever argument they make. Critical reading asks students for deeper and more complex engagement.

Before students begin reading a new text, they might need to read for understanding to get a general idea of what they are about to dive into. Students can quickly preview the text by skimming, not reading every word but focusing on important parts, like headings, bolded words and passages, and introductory sentences.

In other cases, students will be reading for information. Say they are trying to find the date of the Battle of Gettysburg. Here, students would do best to scan a text, reading rapidly and honing in on important words to find specific facts.

When students need to read more carefully, say when doing research for an essay, they should actively read a text, most likely multiple times, apply prior knowledge, and ask questions. This is reading for analysis, also known as reading critically.

In addition to leading to better critical thinking skills and to becoming more discerning adults, research has shown that learning to read critically can improve academic success. Critical reading also comes with other benefits for students.

Modeling how to read critically is also important, starting with asking questions. But how do you know the right ones? Consider these three stages, each with a number of questions to model for your students to ask.

Survey: Have students begin by glancing through a passage, making note of headings, the first sentences of paragraphs, and any pictures, graphs, charts, or other visual components. This step should only take a minute or two.

Read: Now, students will read the entire passage, trying to answer questions from the previous step while also underlining or circling the main idea, key arguments, and important words. They will also make notes in the margin where they agree, disagree, or are confused.

Recite: The fourth and perhaps most crucial step is to have students say what each paragraph is about in their own words. If students can summarize the main idea using their own words, it will help them better understand what they have read.

Students who struggle with comprehension benefit from reading fluency exercises. Read alouds, context clues, and vocabulary are incredibly valuable skillsets for high school students to help build their literacy skills. Read alouds support phonemic awareness, which then improves reading accuracy. Context clues allow students to decipher unfamiliar words, infer new meaning, and identify proper expression. Further, context clues help build vocabulary, which also builds reading speed and comprehension overall.

Evaluate: Once students identify the main arguments of a text, they can break those arguments into two parts: claim and support. Students then can evaluate whether the author has made an argument that is logical, consistent, and believable.

Compare and Contrast: Students will often encounter similar ideas approached in different ways by different authors. Placing the text they read in the context of other texts, and analyzing how they are similar and different, can help with student understanding.

Reading critically requires a more attention from students than when they read for pleasure or for information. In the latter, they might skim, scan, or skip over unfamiliar words or ideas. But students must read the entire text to engage with it critically.

Working with your students to show them how to engage with a text by asking questions, evaluating evidence, and forming their own opinions will positively affect their critical reading and thinking long after high school.

Learn more about how XQ schools and partners are rethinking high school for all learners at xqstaging.wpengine.com and join the conversation on social media using #RethinkHighSchool.

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Making inferences is a skill with which students often need much practice. If you've looked for resources in the same places that I have, you probably haven't been too happy with what you found. I believe that the inference worksheets that I've created are of a higher quality than the other available resources and, as usual, I'm giving them away for free. I hope that you'll appreciate these inference worksheets and that your students may better this valuable reading skills.

I recommend that teachers assign the online versions of these activities. Students get instant feedback, have the opportunity to improve, and are still required to answer the open-ended questions. Feel free to leave a comment if you have a question or need further clarification about any of these worksheets.

When we're reading for pleasure or doing background reading on a topic, we'll generally read the text once, from start to finish. We might apply skimming techniques to look through the text quickly and get the general gist. Our engagement with the text might therefore be quite passive: we're looking for a general understanding of what's being written, perhaps only taking in the bits that seem important.

When we're doing reading for an essay, dissertation, or thesis, we're going to need to actively read the text multiple times. All the while we'll engage our prior knowledge and actively apply it to our reading, asking questions of what's been written.

You'll need to use a combination of these methods when you are reading an academic text: generally, you would scan to determine the scope and relevance of the piece, skim to pick out the key facts and the parts to explore further, then read more closely to understand in more detail and think critically about what is being written.

These strategies are part of your filtering strategy before deciding what to read in more depth. They will save you time in the long run as they will help you focus your time on the most relevant texts!

Scan-reading essentially means that you know what you are looking for. You identify the chapters or sections most relevant to you and ignore the rest. You're scanning for pieces of information that will give you a general impression of it rather than trying to understand its detailed arguments.

Being able to spot a word by sight is a useful skill, but it's not always straightforward. Fortunately there are things to help you. A book might have an index, which might at least get you to the right page. An electronic text will let you search for a specific word or phrase. But context will also help. It might be that the word you're looking for is surrounded by similar words, or a range of words associated with that one. I might be looking for something about colour, and see reference to pigment, light, or spectra, or specific colours being called out, like red or green. I might be looking for something about fruit and come across a sentence talking about apples, grapes and plums. Try to keep this broader context in mind as you scan the page. That way, you're never really just going to be looking for a single word or orange on its own. There will normally be other clues to follow to help guide your eye.

Skim-reading is easier to do if the text is in a language that's very familiar to you, because you will have more of an awareness of the conventions being employed and the parts of speech and writing that you can gloss over. Not only will there be whole sections of a text that you can pretty-much ignore, but also whole sections of paragraphs. For instance, the important sentence in this paragraph is the one right here where I announce that the important part of the paragraph might just be one sentence somewhere in the middle. The rest of the paragraph could just be a framework to hang around this point in order to stop the article from just being a list.

However, it may more often be that the important point for your purposes comes at the start of the paragraph. Very often a paragraph will declare what it's going to be about early on, and will then start to go into more detail. Maybe you'll want to do some closer reading of that detail, or maybe you won't. If the first paragraph makes it clear that this paragraph isn't going to be of much use to you, then you can probably just stop reading it. Or maybe the paragraph meanders and heads down a different route at some point in the middle. But if that's the case then it will probably end up summarising that second point towards the end of the paragraph. You might therefore want to skim-read the last sentence of a paragraph too, just in case it offers up any pithy conclusions, or indicates anything else that might've been covered in the paragraph!

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