Common Core
Featured FAQs
Question:
How can I help older students improve with reading comprehension?Answer:
There are a number of approaches to helping students organize their thinking and get the most out of textbooks. Some of the strategies, such as the SQ4R process, are useful in upper elementary, middle, high school, and college levels.
You may find the following articles of interest:
- Textbook Reading Strategies
- Comprehension Instruction: What Makes Sense Now, What Might Make Sense Soon
- Comprehension Instruction: What Works
- Improving Comprehension for Students with LD
- Reading Aloud to Build Comprehension
- Teach the Seven Strategies of Highly Effective Readers
- 20 Online Resources on Reading with Comprehension and Engagement
- Teaching Reading to Teens with Reading Disabilities
Also, having the students complete simple text summary activities can help you get a better idea of which aspects of comprehension they find difficult. Our sister site, AdLit, has several summary sheets available, as well as an excellent library of comprehension articles.
Finally, the Learning Strategies Database at Muskingum College’s Center for Advancement of Learning (CAL) has a very useful website. It has an extremely comprehensive listing of reading comprehension strategies applicable to both secondary and postsecondary instruction.
Question:
In one of your articles, you stated that strategy instruction is unlikely to help students younger than third or fourth grade. As a first-grade teacher, what can I do to help my students develop their reading comprehension without relying on strategy instAnswer:
I think of three things, two of them rather indirect. The truth is that it's difficult to do much with comprehension in first grade because most of the student's attention and working memory must be directed to the problem of decoding. So the first way that a first-grade teacher can aid comprehension is to ensure that all students can decode fluently.
In later grades, comprehension depends much more on knowledge than it does on reading strategies. Learning reading strategies does give students a sizable boost in comprehension, but it's a one-time thing. Further practice doesn't help. But students who have some knowledge about a passage will comprehend it much better than students who lack that knowledge. In older kids, the correlation between general world knowledge and scores on reading comprehension tests is quite high. (You don't see as high a correlation in young children, because reading testes in early grades focus mostly on decoding, not comprehension.)
Thus, the second thing that a first-grade teacher can do to boost students' reading comprehension is to ensure that students have a broad basis of knowledge. When I hear that science, history, geography and other core subjects are being squeezed out in frantic preparation for reading tests, I am concerned. It may help with reading tests (which are really decoding tests) in first grade, but this practice will come back to haunt school systems when these kids get to fourth or fifth grade-their lack of world knowledge will hurt them on reading comprehension tests.
The third thing a first grade teacher can do — which I'm sure you already know and do, but I couldn't not mention it — is everything possible to ensure that students like reading. Kids who view reading as fun read more, and it's a positive feedback loop. More reading makes reading seem like more fun (because it's easier), which makes students read more, and so on.
