COMPREHENSION

There was a time that we thought that comprehension was caught, not taught.  We assumed that if we taught students how to read the words, overall comprehension would follow naturally. Unfortunately, that doesn’t always happen. Too many of our struggling readers in intermediate and senior grades can say the words on the page but they don’t understand what they’ve read. In fact, a 2014 study of 6000 struggling readers found that only about 8% struggled with decoding. The great majority could read the words with accuracy (and even fluency) but didn’t understand what they read.

When a text is easy and background knowledge robust, we read it with skill; that is, automatically, without much thought to the process we’re engaged in. But when the reading is difficult, readers need a repertoire of strategic actions to draw on in order to make sense of those tough texts. These strategies are used deliberately and intentionally. There are many lists of strategies in the research; we at HIP focus on five:  connecting, questioning, inferring, synthesizing and self-monitoring. Of course, no single reading strategy will work everywhere, all the time. Good readers use different strategies at different times and often integrate several at once.

Although comprehension instruction should focus on what readers do, it’s important to frame that instruction within the context of what the text says. A 2009 study by Beck and MacGowan found that focusing on the content of a text was as effective (if not more so) as focusing on strategies in supporting comprehension.  Read more in the Support for Struggling Readers blog post: Content or Strategies?