Literature Teaching Guides Levels of Understanding

Guide your students from lower-order to higher-order thinking skills.

Instead of teaching your students simply how to answer questions about a particular text, help them acquire the skills to critically evaluate literature.

Levels of Understanding teaching guides challenge students with questions in five learning domains based on Bloom’s Taxonomy for reading comprehension: Comprehension, Reader Response, Analysis, Synthesis, and Evaluation.

The scaffolded structure of each guide supports students of all ability levels—each domain builds on the knowledge gained in the previous one. Plus, Levels of Understanding guides put your class on the path to meeting multiple Common Core State Standards for Reading.

Each Levels of Understanding guide covers five learning domains:

• Comprehension questions assess students’ basic understanding of the text, providing a framework for a fundamental knowledge of plot and character.
• Reader Response questions allow students to make important personal judgments about and connections to the work of literature.
• Analysis questions help students understand craft and structure through a close examination of various literary techniques and devices in the text.
• Synthesis questions foster the integration of knowledge and ideas, as students draw upon their own understanding to form conclusions about themes, motifs, style, and more.
• Evaluation questions challenge students to make qualitative judgments in order to determine whether a particular aspect of a work is effective or ineffective, necessary or redundant, worthwhile or superfluous, etc.