The purpose
Reflecting on how to help these eighth-grade students, I revisited strategies that not only promoted content learning, but also could be used to help build students' self-esteem. I decided to use the proven K-W-L (Ogle, 1986) comprehension strategy in a different manner, as a way to provide concrete evidence to my students that they could become strategic readers. This article describes the results of my action research using the K-W-L as a vehicle to demonstrate to these struggling readers that their understanding of the topics being studied was broadened through their day-to-day interactions with text. My goal was to counter their feelings of being "dumb" and to help them build a visual record