Comprehension Reading Rockets

Helping kids connect with what they read. Hosted by Frank McCourt, this episode highlights effective strategies to help kids understand — and care about — what they read, the ultimate goal of learning how to read. Browse our collection of books to help you continue to deepen your knowledge about reading, writing, and effective classroom instruction. You’ll also find books on reading motivation and reading aloud to children. Research suggests that the answer may lie in providing students with instruction that both teaches them the comprehension strategies that work so well for good readers and helps them to develop the necessary metacognitive... By Akimi Gibson and Judith Gold.

From The Tutor (Winter 2002). Published by LEARNS (a partnership of the NW Regional Educational Laboratory and Bank Street College of Education), produced with funding by the Corporation for National and Community Service. Comprehension is the process of making meaning from written text. In essence, this is what reading is all about! Research has taught us how to support struggling and developing readers to become more proficient and take control of their own reading comprehension (Armbruster et al., 2001). What it means Comprehension develops through a series of active reading strategies.

Teaching and modeling selected strategies for children will help them become interactive readers. Children need to understand what each strategy is, why it is important, and how, when, and where to apply it. Key comprehension strategies include: Proficient readers know when they understand what they read and when they do not, and are able to adjust their reading accordingly. A young child may say, I don't understand what this means. This shows that she is thinking about her reading.

Previewing a story before reading using techniques such as "picture walks" helps children make connections between the story and what they already know. Comprehension is the reason for reading. If readers can read the words but do not understand or connect to what they are reading, they are not really reading. Good readers are both purposeful and active, and have the skills to absorb what they read, analyze it, make sense of it, and make it their own. Reading comprehension is essential for success in school and in life. It’s the foundation for learning in all other subjects.”

Strong readers think actively as they read. They use their experiences and knowledge of the world, morphology, vocabulary, language structure, and reading strategies to make sense of the text and know how to get the most out of it. They think about the text structure as they read. They know when they have problems with understanding and what thinking strategies to use to resolve these problems when they pop up. These elements enable a skilled reader to create a mental model of the text as they read. Teachers can play a critical role in helping students develop their comprehension skills.

Reading research has shown that comprehension instruction can help students do a better job of understanding and remembering what they read. Good instruction can also help students communicate with others, verbally and in writing, about what they’ve read. Good readers draw on prior knowledge and experience to help them understand what they are reading. Comprehension is the whole point of reading. Skilled readers do more than decode the words on the page; they understand and interpret what they read. They construct meaning from text.

By reading actively and purposefully — and by reading a lot — skilled readers can learn from and enjoy what they read, which motivates them to keep reading. This self-reinforcing cycle of knowledge, satisfaction, and motivation is what we all want for our students. After completing this module and successfully answering the post-test questions, you’ll be able to download a certificate of completion. For our students to make sense of what they read, they need to think about and actively engage with text. They need to talk about their reading, too. The discussions that promote comprehension may begin with books we read aloud or, for more fluent readers, books that students read quietly to themselves.

By talking and writing about what they read, students deepen their understanding of the text and they are more likely to remember what they’ve learned. Our ability to facilitate a good conversation about books can make a big difference in how much our students get out of their reading. In Salt Lake City, teacher Margaret Barnes uses a framework called CORI (Concept Oriented Reading Instruction) to teach reading comprehension skills to second and third graders. When it comes to teaching comprehension, our work is never done! Unlike letter-name knowledge or phonics, comprehension can never be mastered. It continues to develop over the course of each individual’s lifetime.

Even for proficient readers, comprehension is dependent on text, purpose, content, and complexity. As anyone knows who’s had the pleasure of seeing a child deeply absorbed in a book, skilled readers don’t decode words for the sake of decoding words. They read for learning and enjoyment. Our students “read to learn” and they read, we hope, for pleasure. They can’t enjoy or learn as much from a text, though, if they don’t start with some basic background knowledge and vocabulary related to the topic at hand. We can build our students’ knowledge base in support of reading comprehension in many ways.

Students learn and remember more from a text when they have some familiarity with the content. In the famous “Baseball Experiment” (opens in a new window) (Recht & Leslie, 1988), students were assessed on how well they understood a passage about a baseball game. Students who had a high level of background knowledge about baseball outperformed other students in the study, independent of their overall reading ability. As researcher Dan Willingham has explained, knowledge makes learning easier: Those with a rich base of factual knowledge find it easier to learn more — the rich get richer. In addition, factual knowledge enhances cognitive processes like problem solving and reasoning.

The richer the knowledge base, the more smoothly and effectively these cognitive processes — the very ones that teachers target — operate. (See: How Knowledge Helps) Reading comprehension, simply stated, is the act of understanding and interpreting what we read. What happens in our students’ brains as they read is anything but simple! Skilled reading depends on a wide range of abilities — everything from concrete, masterable skills like decoding to complex, hard-to-pin-down thinking skills like making inferences. Why is it that reading comes more easily to some children than others?

What makes a skilled reader? Reading researchers have described skilled reading in different ways (Duke, Pearson, Strachan & Billman, 2009; Sedita, 2006; National Reading Panel, 2000), but there are abilities and behaviors that most skilled readers seem to have... Comprehension “strategies” are behaviors that researchers have consistently observed in skilled readers. We explicitly teach these behaviors so that all of our students can benefit from them. Strategic readers understand what they read, but their comprehension doesn’t stop there. They also notice and reflect on their own reading.

By teaching comprehension strategies, we help our students to be aware of their own thinking — to be metacognitive — as they read. We tap into students’ prior knowledge by asking questions like, “What do you know about jellyfish?” And there’s nothing better than seeing the excitement on the face of a first-grade expert who raises his... If we read aloud a story that starts, “She was so excited to get to school that she practically jumped out of bed,” and ask the class, “What time of day is it in...

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