Will Junior Great Books help prepare students for standardized multiple choice reading tests?
Yes. Research on Junior Great Books shows that students who regularly participate in the program make significant improvements in reading comprehension as measured by commonly administered achievement tests. Great Books and the Shared Inquiry method help students learn to comprehend and interpret what they read. By participating in interpretive reading activities and discussing interpretive questions, students learn and practice important reading skills. As they respond to questions and support their answers with evidence from the story, students monitor their comprehension and use a variety of reading strategies. They ask questions, reread, review the story for specific information, make inferences, summarize passages, relate text to personal experience and knowledge, and draw conclusions about cause and effect, character and motive, and the author’s point of view. In addition, Junior Great Books Series 3-5 includes explicit instruction in reading comprehension strategies. Because stu
