As an instructor, my favorite Academic Approach lesson to teach is our “Grasp, Prove, Eliminate (GPE)” Reading strategy because it can be utilized in so many more situations than just standardized testing.
The GPE strategy at its core encourages students to strengthen their understanding of a Reading passage in an effort tomake critical readers and thinkers. It’s also my favorite because it teaches students that they are capable of understanding anything and everything with the right tools and mindset.
“Grasp” refers to the idea of interpreting a passage on a broad scale—it prepares students for questions on main idea,structure, and arguments. We break the Grasp section into a definable “what” and “so what.” “What” is a 3-4 word summary that encapsulates one paragraph at a time. This annotation practice helps readers organize their thoughts, keeptrack of changes, and quickly reference relevant sections of text.
“So what” is a sentence that summarizes the author’s perspective and guesses why they chose to create this text. It is crucial that students are able to read with a critical eye for the author’s goal. Is this person trying to make me think the way they do? Is this a call to action? A personal story? Not only is this a useful skill in test prep but the Grasp strategy also challenges students to fully understand everything they read and to analyze its purpose.
This is an especially important skill for students these days since the internet presents high schoolers with an abundance of fake news and influencing that they need to be able to sift through and critically analyze. If we can teach them, through test prep, to be critical readers and thinkers, they will be prepared to advocate for themselves in a digital landscape.
“Prove” is a four-step method designed to ensure that students select the answer choice with the most evidence from the passage. We teach students to:
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- Identify the key terms in the question.
- Link those key terms to the relevant context area in the passage.
- Read the context area surrounding these key terms.
- Link key terms from the relevant context area to key terms in the correct answer.
We use this strategy in Reading and Science (for students still electing to take the ACT Science section) to effectively identify what is 1) true and 2) supported by the text. “Prove” is, most importantly, a repeatable skill; it can be used over and over in a classroom or testing setting. When completing homework or tests, this method is the most efficient way for your student to parse through text and increase their accuracy. Additionally, it reminds students that they should gatherinformation to make thoughtful decisions.
Finally, the “Eliminate” portion of the GPE strategy focuses on ignoring answer choices that are irrelevant, contradictory, or extreme—it’s a surefire way of narrowing down answers in a multiple-choice test.
Irrelevant answers have nothing to do with either the passage as a whole or the specifics presented in the question. Contradictory answers directly oppose the claims the author makes in a passage. Extreme answer choices use languagelike “all, every, none” to dramatize information from the text. There’s so much inflammatory language in our world today, so students should understand how to identify and question contradictory or absolute thinking in their studies, in their peers, and within themselves.
When we use the GPE strategy to turn students into critical readers and writers, students can efficiently interpret socialmedia posts, texts and emails, classic novels, scientific journals, and whatever information they take in day-to-day. Not only are they building reading comprehension and verbal skills, but they’re learning to problem solve by finding the best solution, not the easiest one. “Grasp, Prove, Eliminate” is my favorite lesson because it gives students a toolkit for effective learning and communicating.
