The Strategic Literacy Initiative Home | About SLI What's New Professional Development Publications & Presentations Resources for Teachers Evaluation & Assessment Related Research & Resources Contact Information: Ruth Schoenbach Co-Director (510) 302-4255 rschoen@wested.org Cyndy Greenleaf Co-Director (510) 302-4222 cgreenl@wested.org Jana Bouc Program Coordinator (510) 302-4245 jbouc@wested.org		Guess and Check   Purpose "Guess and Check" is a phrase that will be familiar to many students from math. Guess and Check is a simple way of reminding students to check their predictions, to look in the text for evidence to support their predictions and to check this evidence against their own background knowledge. This classroom application has proven to be especially effective in many ESL, resource and middle school classrooms. Materials Reading logs or notebooks Guess and Check handout or directions (Two versions are included below, one for math and one for other content areas.) Reading material chunked at points allowing for predicting. Process As students read, ask them to keep a log from one reading to the next. They can copy (or paste) the directions into the log. At the beginning of each reading, ask them to make a prediction, an educated guess or hypothesis, about what will follow. At the end of the reading, or before the next reading, ask students to check to see if their predictions made sense. (This works best if students are reading chunks of text that naturally call for predicting, such as a chapter at a time in English or a chunk from subheading to subheading in science or history. In math a logical chunk may be from the point where they begin solving a problem to the point where they check and answer as in the example below.) The logs below are adapted from the prediction section of the Reciprocal Teaching Logs and can be used for narrative or expository texts in any content area, although teachers may want to adapt them for their own specific purposes. A sampling of prompts for math follow. Many other possibilities exist; feel free to create others that fit your texts and content. These Guess and Check directions could be replicated for use in English, science or history classes:       Guess and Check Reading Name: Date: Text: Pages:   Re-read your prediction from the last entry. Was your prediction correct?   If so, how were you able to guess?   If not, are there any clues that you missed? Why did you make the prediction that you made? Could your prediction have made sense?   What information do you think will come next? What makes you think so?     This information can be found at http://www.wested.org /stratlit/ideas/guessandcheck.shtml Last modified March 16, 2001 ©2009 WestEd® || (415) 565-3000 || www.WestEd.org All rights reserved. No portion may be reproduced without permission of WestEd.