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Getting More Out of Reading in Social Studies: Three-Step Reading

Becca Horowitz
Have you explored OER Project’s Three-Step Reading resources yet? Our approach is designed to help students engage with complex texts in three rounds: skimming for big ideas, digging into key details and evidence, and finally evaluating and connecting what they’ve read. The tool guides students through these steps with prompts like:
What's the main idea of this article?
Which evidence supports the author's claim?
How did this reading confirm, extend, or challenge your understanding of world history?
This blog post--Doing More with Three-Step Reading--shares strategies for using the resource not just to improve comprehension, but also to spark critical conversations, build vocabulary, and make stronger connections to historical thinking skills.
  • How do you help students slow down and really work with a text, rather than racing through it?
  • Which strategies from the blog or worksheet feel most useful in your classroom?
  • Or, if you've already tried Three-Step Reading, what worked well--and what challenges did you notice?

  •  I incorporate the Three-Step Reading early in the year by reading articles together in class. To streamline the process, I do the first part orally as a group, which works well because it prepares students to anticipate and infer what the reading will be about. Then we read the article using a popcorn reading approach. I try to complete most of the chart in class by having students work in pairs. This year, I would like to incorporate a simplified version of the Three-Step Reading when assigning articles as homework—perhaps by asking students to begin with a mental first reading (titles, subtitles, images, charts, with the goal of making this an automatic practice) and then follow up with a deeper reading to complete the activity. 

  •  I am glad that the OER now includes a guide to interprete graphs, a very important skill to teach in our courses. I teach AP Human Geography, where this is a crucial skill, and I extend it to all my courses. To introduce the skill, I use an article from World History that now seemes to have been discontinued: A Guide to Reading Charts (attached). If time allows, I also show a Crash Course video on Data & Infographics.


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  • in reply to Laura Massa

      - I love this scaffolded approach!  Thanks for sharing. 

  • in reply to Carrie Emmerson

      I am glad it helps. It worked very well with my students. 

  • Thanks for asking,  .  I have created a Three Part Reading Template that I have students use for note taking and sometimes as homework.  It is really easy to copy and paste the Guiding Questions from the Lesson Page (and find answers when I "tap the hammer" on the Lesson Guide.) I made one for videos, too.

    I have found the OER chart to be a bit overwhelming for my students (and me).  I can pull out those other elements in class discussion around the questions a bit more easily than teasing it out on the chart.  It allows for a quick comprehension check, but still gets the students thinking a bit more critically when we review in class. 

  • One thing I've noticed is that students sometimes have a hard time idenifying critical content in the second step of the Three-Step Reading Strategy. To provide a little more structure and guidance, I like to use the guiding questions for the article/graphic biography for that second step. Paired with the initial skim and the final support/challenge/extend questions, this usually works pretty well.

  • Hi   - I've been using the Three Close Reads as a protocol in class, and this seems to be an updated, streamlined approach to that.  The feedback I had gotten from the students about the Three Close Reads protocol for AP World is that it was somewhat redundant.   Thanks for highlighting this resource!

  • I incorporate the Three-Step Reading Strategies with my 9th grade World kids early on in the school year, and make it a recurring process throughout the semester. After practice, this process does become a bid redundant for students, but by that point, they are engaging with the content well enough to edit things down. 

    One strategy I utilize is adding in an annotation to Read #2. While they are working to understand the content, they are highlighting the main ideas, academic vocabulary, and their connections or questions about the material. This is a great way to help them engage further with the content.

  • in reply to Allyson Eubanks

    Yes, that is a great idea,  !  I love using the Kami app for students to highlight and markup readings that I distribute to them online.  It's an extension off Google Chrome, and embedded in Google Classroom.

    I still have sets of highlighters in my classroom for the paper packets too, since we are trying to balance how much time we have students on their screens these days.

  • in reply to Anne Koschmider

    I agree with you  the second part is hard for students to complete because we ask them to do several things: read, understand, look up new vocabulary, and identify key concepts. I like your suggestion to include the questions now available in the Teacher Tools (the Hummer). They are helpful, at least at the beginning, when students are learning how to read appropriately.