Biography Project: Research and Class Presentation

Overview

Featured Resources

From Theory to Practice

 

OVERVIEW

Set the stage for high-interest reading with a purpose through a biography project. Students work together to generate questions they would like to answer about several well-known people, then each student chooses one of these and finds information by reading a biography from the library and doing Internet research. Students create a graphic organizer (a web) to organize the facts they have found and share what they have learned about their subjects through oral presentations. Students evaluate themselves and their classmates by using a rubric during the research and graphic organizer-creation process and by giving written feedback on one another's presentations.

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FEATURED RESOURCES

Bio-Cube: This planning tool can help students organize their research; use it as an extension to the lesson and have them outline the lives they' researched before writing their own biographies.

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FROM THEORY TO PRACTICE

International Reading Association. (2001). Comprehension, Part II: Text Comprehension. International Reading Association's Summary of the (U.S.) National Reading Panel Report "Teaching Children to Read." Retrieved October 1, 2003, from http://www.reading.org/General/CurrentResearch/Reports/NationalReadingPanelReport.aspx.

• By using graphic organizers, students write or draw meanings and relationships of underlying ideas. This has been shown to improve students' ability to recall content.
  
  
• By summarizing information, students improve in including ideas related to the main idea, generalizing, and removing redundancy.
  
  
• By working in cooperative groups, students may increase their learning of reading strategies through peer discussion. They may also lead to better comprehension.

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