Anticipation Guides for Science Classes

I teach science to at-risk teens and reading is often a struggle for many of them. They may read out loud well but when it comes to comprehension they’re weak. Plus the background information they bring to high school classes is often limited. They need scaffolding to help them bridge these limitations. Anticipation Guides are a pre-reading strategy I use that helps overcome the gaps by activating student’s prior knowledge even if it’s weak. In addition the guides build motivation to look for information as they read.


What are anticipation guides? They really are a very simple concept. Each guide is essentially a set of true and false general statements that set the stage for a reading assignment by providing students with a hook to hang new knowledge onto.


The way I use these guides in my class is to tell students we will be reading about such and such. I hand out the guides and have students go through each statement on their own. They check agree or disagree and then we briefly discuss their responses. Usually I have a show of hands for each statement and one person give their reasoning. (I tell my students to not change their answers yet based on our discussion responses. They will get a second chance after they read. My students do not have a long attention span and easily go off track so this discussion short. I move them quickly onto the next task of reading the text.)


Student silently read the text material then revisit each statement with a second agree or disagree to see if anything has changed. I use a version of anticipation guides that extends the dept of information by asking students to give a reason or justify why they agree or disagree. I also allow students to work through their justifications in small groups so they can challenge each others thinking. Then we revisit the discussion as above with a student from each group giving a reason for their thinking.


Before I hand out the guides I let students know goal isn’t to have right or wrong answer and their work isn’t being graded for correctness but only for completeness. I tell them I want them to make predictions and explore their responses as they read. We can correct mistakes later but I expect them to fill in the entire guide. (If they have not used anticipation guides before you may have to walk them through the first statement or two)


Anticipation guides also give teachers a chance to evaluate prior knowledge and look for misconceptions. As I walk around the room while students are work I make note of particular areas many students seem to be misconstruing facts so we can zero in on those later.


In high and middle school anticipation guides have been traditionally used in literature classes to set the stage for stories. But the guides also can lend themselves well to content dense courses like science. And this is especially true if you have struggling readers who are weak at zeroing in on main ideas in dense material.


Good readers access their prior knowledge and actively engage with their text as they read. Poor readers are often passive many times with limited background information. Anticipation guides help give a strategy that helps poor develop the skills of good readers even with limited prior knowledge.


Here’s a sample of a free anticipation guide for ecology. It’s for basic ecological concepts and can be used with middle or high school students. I would love to get feedback on how it works for you.

http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Ecological-Systems-Extended-Anticipation-Guide