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How to Use the Question-Answer Relationship to Improve Comprehension

Testing is stressful for students and teachers, but with careful preparation and strategy instruction, students can feel confident. This post explains the Question-Answer Relationship Strategy.

Question-Answer Relationship or QAR is one of my favorite questioning strategies. Each May, every teacher get stressed out when students take their end of the year assessments. The pressure really is great, and we could spend hours debating the benefits of these tests. One thing we know for sure though is that the tests aren’t going away any time soon.

How to prepare our short people to do the best they can and preserve their love of reading is essential. ย I believe the answer is by teaching them to think like good readers with strategy instruction and mix up the way we present information in order for each to find a way to think about reading that works for them. Question-answer relationship is one strategy I’ve used to support my students.

What is Question-Answer Relationship?

Testing is stressful for students and teachers, but with careful preparation and strategy instruction, students can feel confident. This post explains the Question-Answer Relationship Strategy which is very helpful with testing.

Question-Answer Relationship or QAR for short was developed by Taffy Raphael, and the basic idea with QAR is to help students analyze questions and sort them by the type of question they best fit. With QAR, students match questions with one of the four types- Right There (RT), Think and Search (TS), Author and Me (AM), and On My Own (OMO).

To teach QAR, I model with a read aloud alouds and an assortment of question cards.  We start by sorting them into two categories…In the Book or In my Head.  We practice this with several mentor texts before breaking the questions down even more.

  • Right there…one place
  • Think and Search…multiple places
  • Author and Me…inference type questions
  • On My Own…no book needed…solely opinion

After practicing with teacher made questions, I move on to having my students develop their own questions to go with their reading.  They put them on sticky notes and we sort them on a chart I made (a four column chart).  Another option is to have students pair up and practice reading, sorting, and answering each other’s questions.

Helpful question-answer relationship Resources:

To prepare for this blog post,  I searched around some for resources you might be able to use in your teaching, and I liked this set from Adventures of a Third Grade Teacher, Amber Polk.  The set has printable chart headers to use and put together a sorting board like I mentioned. She also includes a bookmark with question prompts which would be helpful to students in generating their own questions.

How to Use the Question-Answer Relationship to Improve Comprehension
How to Use the Question-Answer Relationship to Improve Comprehension

This set of questions, I used with my third grade students when we studied fables.  The fables are short, so it worked well for small group instruction and modeling.  This was a set that I found a long time ago. The only name I could find on the questions was in the word file, so with this set, I am sharing something I did not create, but was readily available on the internet.  It was very helpful in planning for my third grade groups, and it addressed both questioning and Fable studies.

When students are ready to work in pairs to create their own questions, these question stems might be helpful.  If you wish to do a jigsaw with these, you might cut the types apart and have teams use them to create questions about a sample text.

Mentor Texts for modeling Question-answer relationship:

As I have taught QAR, I have used a few mentor texts.  The titles I have used are listed below.  I think the best book choices for QAR are the books that lead to lots of discussion and inference.

  • Hooway for Wodney Wat by Mem Fox
  • Tuesday by David Weisner
  • Frog and Toad Together by Arnold Lobel
  • Diary of a Worm by Doreen Cronin
  • Jumanji by Chris Van Allsburg and
  • Piggie Pie by Margie Palantini
Testing is stressful for students and teachers, but with careful preparation and strategy instruction, students can feel confident. This post explains the Question-Answer Relationship Strategy.

I think one thing all teachers could agree upon is that QAR is a deep topic.  It’s a strategy that can really help students think about their reading and improve their test taking skills.  If you’re in a testing grade, this is one strategy to explore further.  I have barely touched on the topic, so stay tuned.  I believe this will be an issue #1 post with a follow-up coming this weekend.

Thanks for reading, and if you’re a reading teacher or just love teaching reading, I hope you’ll join in to share reading strategies that have helped your students in the comments. I love learning new tips and seeing different ways to present skills, so let’s link up!!

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Carla with Comprehension Connection
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2 Responses

  1. This is an excellent comprehension strategy. Thank you for sharing some great resources to go with it. I love the mentor texts you mentioned, although I'm not familiar with Tuesday. I'll have to check that one out.

    Mary
    Fit to be Fourth
    Follow me on Bloglovin

  2. Hi Mary! If you know the book, Hurricane, it's the same author. I found online question cards to go with it to sort by type. I think if you Google the book and QAR, it'd show up.

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Hello and Welcome to the Comprehension Connection Blog!

I’m Carla, the author of Comprehension Connection. I’m a recently retired Literacy Coach and TPT author. I’m a Wife to a great guy, Mom to two grown children and two fur babies. I’m a Virginia Blogger, a Travel Lover, a Coffee Drinker, and a Gal who loves All Things Techie.

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