Anticipation Guides

Description

An anticipation guide consists of a list of statements that are related to the topic of the text your students will be reading. While some of the statements may be clearly true or false, a good anticipation guide includes statements that provoke disagreement and challenge students’ beliefs about the topic. Before reading the text, students indicate for each statement whether they agree or disagree with it.

Purpose

Anticipation guides serve two primary purposes:

1. Elicit students’ prior knowledge of the topic of the text.
   
2. Set a purpose for reading. (Students read to gather evidence that will either confirm their initial beliefs or cause them to rethink those beliefs.)

How to Use Anticipation Guides

• Choose a text. (This strategy works well with most expository texts. It works particularly well with texts that present ideas that are somewhat controversial to the readers.)
• Write several statements that focus on the topic of the text. Next to each statement, provide a place for students to indicate whether they agree or disagree with the statements.

Tips for writing statements:

• Write statements that focus on the information in the text that you want your students to think about.
• Write statements that students can react to without having read the text.
• Write statements for which information can be identified in the text that supports and/or opposes each statement.
• Write statements that challenge students’ beliefs (Duffelmeyer, 1994).
• Write statements that are general rather than specific (Duffelmeyer, 1994).

• Have students complete the anticipation guide before reading. The guide can be completed by students individually, or in small groups. Remind students that they should be prepared to discuss their reactions to the statements on the anticipation guide after they have completed it.
  
• Have a class discussion before reading. Encourage students who have differing viewpoints to debate and defend their positions.
  
• Have students read the text. Encourage students to write down ideas from the text that either support their initial reaction to each statement, or cause them to rethink those reactions.
  
• Have a class discussion after reading. Ask students if any of them changed their minds about their positions on each statement. Ask them to explain why. Encourage them to use information from the text to support their positions.

Example

Following is an example (adapted from Duffelmeyer, 1994) of an anticipation guide that might be used with a text that talks about computers in the workplace.

Duffelmeyer, F. (1994). Effective Anticipation Guide statements for learning from expository prose. Journal of Reading, 37, 452-455.