I've run into the most reading problems with students at the prison. Many students there have GEDs because they didn't complete high school prior to entering the prison system. Some understand a text easily if it is read out loud to them, but struggle to get through a text reading on their own. Last time I tutored there, both another tutor and I worked with a student on reading strategies. He does fine when the material is familiar, but once it becomes more complex, theoretical, or outside of the scope of his personal experiences, it becomes harder for him to understand. We showed him how to identify topic sentences, and how sentences concluding paragraphs offer summaries of the paragraph's content. We mostly discussed strategies for getting through the text and understanding each component part. However, he might also benefit from strategies that help him connect the pieces into a whole argument. He might like the "what it says" and "what it does" strategy as he becomes better at identifying a sentence's role in a paragraph (or a paragraph's role in an article). Mostly what we discussed with him was "what it does," and adding "what it says" can help transition him toward more global strategies for understanding an argument. Students in prison are frequently asked to write open-ended "reflections," and it may also be helpful for him to re-frame his "reflection" as a summary/response log to help put those pieces together.

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