Reading comprehension strategies that work, and how to teach them

What is reading comprehension?

Reading comprehension is building meaning from text. A reader takes the words on the page, connects them to what they already know, and forms a mental picture of what the text is saying. That picture is what lets them answer questions, retell a story or explain an idea later.

Comprehension depends on two broad abilities. Gough and Tunmer's simple view of reading describes it as the product of decoding and language comprehension. A student needs to read the words accurately and understand the language those words make. Weakness in either one limits comprehension, no matter how strong the other is.

That's why comprehension strategies are only part of the picture. Strategies help students use what they know. They can't replace decoding, vocabulary or background knowledge, which are the raw materials of understanding.

Which comprehension strategies have research behind them?

The National Reading Panel in 2000 and the What Works Clearinghouse guide on K to 3 comprehension in 2010 both reviewed the research. Their lists overlap a great deal, and the guide rated strategy instruction as having strong evidence.

These strategies describe what good readers do anyway. The point of teaching them is to make that hidden process visible to students who don't do it on their own.

How much strategy instruction is enough?

Less than many curriculums assume. Reviews of strategy research, including a well-known summary by Daniel Willingham, found that students gain quickly from brief strategy teaching, often within a handful of lessons. Long units that spend weeks on a single strategy don't seem to add much more.

Strategies are a bit like a trick for remembering. Once a student knows to stop and check understanding, they know it. What they need after that isn't more practice naming the strategy, but more rich texts where the strategy is useful.

How do you teach a comprehension strategy?

Use a gradual release: show it, do it together, then let students try it with support before doing it alone. The text should be rich enough that the strategy is actually needed.

1. Explain what the strategy is and why readers use it, in a sentence or two.
2. Model it with a think-aloud, saying your thinking out loud as you read.
3. Practice it together on the next part of the text, with students sharing their thinking.
4. Have students try it in pairs while you listen and coach.
5. Have students use it on their own, then talk about how it helped.

Why does background knowledge matter so much?

Knowledge is often the biggest factor in whether a student understands a text. In a famous study by Recht and Leslie, middle school students who knew a lot about baseball understood a baseball passage better than strong readers who knew little about the game. Knowledge mattered more than general reading skill.

Writers leave out information they assume readers know. A sentence about a team losing "in the bottom of the ninth" means nothing to a reader who doesn't know baseball. Strategies can't fill that gap. Only knowledge can, which is why a knowledge-rich curriculum is one of the best comprehension investments a school can make.

What role does discussion play?

Talking about a text helps students build and check their understanding. The WWC guide recommends guiding students through focused, high-quality discussion of a text's meaning. That means open questions about the text, not a quiz of recall questions.

Good discussion questions require students to go back to the text and think. "What did the character do?" checks recall. "Why do you think she changed her mind, and what in the text tells you?" asks for reasoning and evidence. Aim for more of the second kind.

How should texts be chosen for comprehension work?

Choose texts that are worth understanding. Strategies need texts with real ideas, interesting problems and enough complexity to require thought. A thin text gives students nothing to think about, so even good strategy teaching falls flat.

In the early grades, many of these texts should be read aloud, because students can understand much harder language by listening than by reading on their own. As decoding grows, students read more of the texts themselves, with support where needed.

Groups of texts on one topic are especially useful. Reading several texts about the ocean in a few weeks builds knowledge and vocabulary that make each new text easier to understand.

What about students who can decode but don't understand?

Some students read aloud smoothly and still can't tell you what a passage was about. For these students, check vocabulary and background knowledge first. Then check whether they're monitoring at all, since many weak comprehenders don't notice when they've lost the thread.

Teaching these students to stop and check understanding, and to use fix-up moves like rereading, often helps quickly. Pair that with vocabulary teaching and lots of discussion about texts.

What about students who struggle with decoding?

For students who can't yet read the words, comprehension strategies on their own reading won't help much. They need decoding instruction first. Meanwhile, keep building their comprehension through read-alouds and discussion, so their language and knowledge keep growing while decoding catches up.

Don't let these students fall behind on content and vocabulary. A student who misses three years of rich text because they couldn't decode will have a knowledge gap long after decoding is fixed.

How do you check comprehension?

Use more than one kind of check, because each one shows a different piece of the picture. Retelling shows whether a student can recall and organize the main events. Open questions show whether they can explain and infer. Short written summaries show whether they can pick out what matters.

Listen for the reason behind a wrong answer. A student who misunderstood a key word needs different help from one who didn't connect two sentences, or one who didn't know the topic at all.

How does comprehension monitoring work?

Monitoring means noticing when you've stopped understanding. Skilled readers do this automatically: they feel a small jolt when a sentence doesn't fit, and they go back to fix it. Many struggling readers don't feel that jolt at all. They keep reading even when nothing makes sense, and they're surprised later when they can't answer questions.

Teach students to stop at the end of each paragraph and ask themselves whether it made sense. If it didn't, they can reread, read ahead a little, look closely at a confusing word, or ask for help. Post these fix-up moves on a card, model them often, and praise students out loud when you see them use one.

What does a week of comprehension teaching look like?

Here is a simple plan for a third grade class reading a nonfiction book about rivers. On Monday, the teacher builds a little background knowledge with a map and a short video, then teaches five key words. Students read the first chapter with a partner and stop twice to ask each other a question.

On Tuesday and Wednesday, the teacher models summarizing with a think-aloud, and students practice on the next two chapters. On Thursday, the class discusses a big question, such as why so many cities were built on rivers, using evidence from the book. On Friday, students write a short summary and answer one question that needs an inference, and the teacher uses those responses to plan the next week.

Where can I find routines to start with?

If you want a ready-made starting point, our routines library includes scripted versions of several of these practices, including read-aloud prompts, a story map, a main idea summary and a four-strategy group routine. Each one has teacher lines, student practice and common corrections, so you can try a strategy tomorrow and adapt it as you learn what your students need.

Should strategies be taught with easy or hard texts?

Use texts that are hard enough to need the strategy. If a passage is so simple that students understand it without effort, practicing a strategy on it feels pointless, and students learn that strategies are busywork.

For the modeling step, read a challenging text aloud so decoding isn't a barrier. For partner and independent practice, choose texts students can read with good accuracy but that still contain ideas worth puzzling over.

Common questions from parents

Parents often ask how to help with comprehension at home. Read together, talk about what happened and why, and ask your child what they're wondering about. Those conversations build the same habits strategy lessons teach, without any worksheets.