The Cause and Effect strategy asks students to analyze texts through cause-and-effect relationships. This enhances students’ comprehension, enabling them to make connections between events, actions, or phenomena and their outcomes. It also fosters analytical reasoning, as students use patterns and relationships to draw conclusions.
Understanding cause and effect involves seeking answers to the questions “How does it work?” and “What happens/happened and why?” It also requires students to understand that only by studying the past can we see the full scope of an event, policy, or person’s impact.
Procedure
1
Provide each student with a Cause and Effect graphic organizer (or invite students to create one in their notebooks) and introduce the reading by setting a purpose for reading.
2
Explain that as students read they will look for the causes and/or effects related to the topic of the article or lesson.
3
As time allows, ask students to share with a partner, a small group, or the whole class. This fosters metacognition and helps students monitor their own learning. It also develops a classroom where students learn from each other and consider alternative perspectives and ideas.
4
Debrief as desired to emphasize a particular relationship or effect, or to make predictions or otherwise deepen student thinking.
Differentiation
Scaffolded Organizer: To scaffold the task and further guide student reading, consider providing a scaffolded organizer in which the causes are labeled. This sets an additional purpose for reading and helps students tune into the key details. Additionally, paragraph numbers can be provided to guide students in locating the effects. This is particularly helpful when the effects are implied and for students who need additional support with syntax and language development. Younger students can also draw their cause-and-effect relationships to further aid their understanding.
Vocabulary Support: Provide students with a list of key words that may signal a cause-and-effect relationship in the text. For example: because, led to, since, so, that is why, the effect of, therefore, the reason that.
Ongoing Effects: When applicable, ask students to add a third column to their organizer, titled “Ongoing Effects.” Invite them to consider how today’s world is still impacted by this cause-and-effect relationship.
Possible Solutions and Future Problems: Encourage students to use what they have learned about the cause-and-effect relationship to predict possible solutions to a problem, anticipate future problems that could arise, or explain more complicated concepts or phenomena. This requires students to think more broadly about the topic, making connections to the world around them.
Variations
Short-Term or Long-Term: After reading, ask students to review their list of effects and decide whether each was a short-term or long-term effect. Encourage students to discuss their responses with classmates, providing additional evidence for why they chose short-term or long-term as their answer.
