Which practice is essential for developing students' critical thinking skills through reading?

Promoting connections to prior knowledge is essential for developing students' critical thinking skills through reading because it actively engages students in the learning process. When students relate new information to what they already know, they create mental frameworks that enhance understanding and retention. This practice encourages them to analyze and synthesize information rather than simply memorizing it. By making connections, students learn to question texts, draw inferences, and develop a deeper understanding of the content. This interaction between new and existing knowledge fosters critical thinking as students evaluate relationships, assess relevance, and construct meaning, which are key elements of higher-order thinking.

While independent reading, vocabulary development, and using a variety of texts are important components of literacy education, they do not inherently target the cognitive processes that critical thinking requires as directly as making connections to prior knowledge does.