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Educators rethink how to teach reading after flaws are revealed in prior methods

Elissa Nadworny

Some states have passed laws or implemented policies related to evidence-based reading instruction — as two-thirds of children struggle to read. How are colleges that train teachers responding?

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BRIEF RESEARCH REPORT article

The use of new technologies for improving reading comprehension.

• 1 Department of General Psychology, University of Padova, Padua, Italy
• 2 Azienda Sociosanitaria Ligure 5 Spezzino, La Spezia, Italy

Since the introduction of writing systems, reading comprehension has always been a foundation for achievement in several areas within the educational system, as well as a prerequisite for successful participation in most areas of adult life. The increased availability of technologies and web-based resources can be a really valid support, both in the educational and clinical field, to devise training activities that can also be carried out remotely. There are studies in current literature that has examined the efficacy of internet-based programs for reading comprehension for children with reading comprehension difficulties but almost none considered distance rehabilitation programs. The present paper reports data concerning a distance program Cloze , developed in Italy, for improving language and reading comprehension. Twenty-eight children from 3rd to 6th grade with comprehension difficulties were involved. These children completed the distance program for 15–20 min for at least three times a week for about 4 months. The program was presented separately to each child, with a degree of difficulty adapted to his/her characteristics. Text reading comprehension (assessed distinguishing between narrative and informative texts) increased after intervention. These findings have clinical and educational implications as they suggest that it is possible to promote reading comprehension with a distance individualized program, avoiding the need for the child displacements, necessary for reaching a rehabilitation center.

Introduction

Reading comprehension is a fundamental cognitive ability for children, that supports school achievement and successively participation in most areas of adult life ( Hulme and Snowling, 2011 ). Therefore, children with learning disabilities (LD) and special educational needs who show difficulties in text comprehension, sometimes also in association with other problems, may have an increased risk of life and school failure ( Woolley, 2011 ). Reading comprehension is, indeed, a complex cognitive ability which involves not only linguistic (e.g., vocabulary, grammatical knowledge), but also cognitive (such as working memory, De Beni and Palladino, 2000 ), and metacognitive skills (both for the aspects of knowledge and control, Channa et al., 2015 ), and, more specifically, higher order comprehension skills such as the generation of inferences ( Oakhill et al., 2003 ).

Recently, due to the diffusion of technology in many fields of daily life, text comprehension at school, at home during homework, and at work is based on an increasing number of digital reading devices (computers and laptops, e-books, and tablet devices) that can become a fundamental support to improve traditional reading comprehension and learning skills (e.g., inference generation).

Some authors contrasted in children with typical development the effects of the technological interface on reading comprehension vs printed texts ( Kerr and Symons, 2006 ; Rideout et al., 2010 ; Mangen et al., 2013 ; Singer and Alexander, 2017 ; Delgado et al., 2018 ). Results were consistent and showed a worse comprehension performance in screen texts compared to printed texts for children ( Mangen et al., 2013 ; Delgado et al., 2018 ) and adolescents who nonetheless showed a preference for digital texts compared to printed texts ( Singer and Alexander, 2017 ). Regarding children with learning problems, only few studies considered the differences between printed texts and digital devices ( Chen, 2009 ; Gonzalez, 2014 ; Krieger, 2017 ) finding no significant differences, suggesting that the use of compensative digital tools for children with a learning difficulty could be a valid alternative with respect to the traditional written texts in facilitating their academic and work performance. This conclusion is also supported by the results of a meta-analysis ( Moran et al., 2008 ), regarding the use of digital tools and learning environments for enhancing literacy acquisition in middle school students, which demonstrates that technology can improve reading comprehension.

Different procedures and abilities are targeted in the international literature concerning computerized training programs for reading comprehension. In particular, various studies include activities promoting cognitive (e.g., vocabulary, inference making) and metacognitive (e.g., the use of strategies, comprehension monitoring, and identification of relevant parts in a text) components of reading comprehension. Table 1 reports the list of papers proposing computerized training programs with a summary of the findings encountered. Participants involved cover different ages and school grades, the majority belonging to middle school and high school. The general outcome of the studies is positive due to a significant improvement in comprehension skills after the training program with long-lasting effects also during follow-up; indeed, the majority of participants involved in training programs outperformed their peers assigned to comparison groups and maintained their improvements. Specifically, several studies ( O’Reilly et al., 2004 ; Magliano et al., 2005 ; McNamara et al., 2006 ) used the iSTART program with adolescents and young adults. This program promotes self-explanation, prior knowledge and reading strategies to enhance understanding of descriptive scientific texts. Results demonstrated that students who followed the iSTART program received more benefits than their peers, improving self-explanation and summarization. Additionally, strategic knowledge was a relevant factor for the outcome in comprehension tasks including multiple choice questions: students who already possessed good strategic knowledge improved their accuracy when answering to bridging inference questions, whereas students with low strategic knowledge became more accurate with text-based questions. Another program, ITSS, was used with younger students ( Meyer et al., 2011 ; Wijekumar et al., 2012 , 2013 , 2017 ), with the objective to support activities based on identifying main parts and key words in a text and classifying information in a hierarchical order. Positive outcomes were found also with such program since students who followed the ITSS program significantly improved text comprehension compared to their peers in the control group.

Table 1. Synthesis of the main results of the computerized training programs on comprehension present in the literature.

Although most of the literature deals with typical development, also cases of students with learning difficulties were considered. For example, Potocki et al. (2013) (see also Potocki et al., 2015 ) examined the effects of two different computerized programs with specific aims: one focusing on comprehension features, such as inference making and the analysis of text structure, the other considering decoding skills. Both training programs brought some benefits to reading comprehension, however larger effects were found with the program focused on comprehension with long-lasting effects in listening and reading comprehension (see also Kleinsz et al., 2017 ). Studies by Johnson-Glenberg (2005) and Kim et al. (2006) , using respectively the programs 3D Readers and CACSR, were able to promote reading comprehension abilities in middle school students through metacognitive activities. Thanks to these programs students also became more aware of reading strategies and implemented them more successfully during text comprehension. In particular, a study by Niedo et al. (2014) , obtained positive results on silent reading in a small group of children struggling with reading using the “cloze” procedure. This procedure proposes exercises in which parts of a text, typically words, are missing and participants are required to complete the text guessing what is missing.

Thus, computerized programs generally seem to improve reading comprehension skills. However, it should be noticed that, in most cases, students were trained at school, without the personalized support of a clinician taking into consideration the cognitive and psychological needs of the child. In particular, to our knowledge, no program examined the effects of an internet-based distance reading comprehension program which allows the child to be trained at home in a personalized way. A useful aspect of an internet-based distance training is that the psychologist can monitor with the application ( app ) the child’s results and activities and write him/her some motivational messages, reducing the attritions present in programs carried out at home with the only supervision of parents. Literature concerning distance trainings is still rare, however, some evidence suggests that these programs may represent a good integration to other types of intervention, usually carried out at school, in a rehabilitation center or at home (e.g., Mich et al., 2013 ).

Therefore, despite still preliminary, we think that it is relevant to present data about a distance program developed in Italy named Cloze ( Cornoldi and Bertolo, 2013 ), devised for rehabilitation purposes but with potential implication also for educational contexts. Cloze has been developed to promote inferential abilities both at a sentence- and discourse-level using the “cloze” procedure. Several findings in the literature demonstrate that abilities, such as anticipating text parts and inference making, bring improvements in text comprehension (e.g., Yuill and Oakhill, 1988 ) and it has been shown that one way to promote inferential competences is to improve the ability to predict parts of the text that are missing or that follow, considering the available information: the “cloze” technique appears to be one of the most successful ways for this purpose (e.g., Greene, 2001 ).

In the current study the effectiveness of this training program has been tested on a clinical population who exhibited, for various reasons, difficulties in reading comprehension. Participants were 28 children (16 male and 12 female) attending a private practice for learning difficulties in the city of La Spezia, in the north-west of Italy, from 3rd to 6th school grade (5 of 3rd, 9 of 4th, 11 of 5th and 3 of 6th grade), with a mean age of children of M = 9.79 years (SD = 1.03). Seventeen children had a current or past speech disorder: of these children 10 also had a LD (Learning Disabilities) and one was bilingual (speech problems were not due to bilingualism). The other 11 children had a LD or important learning difficulties, and one of them had also ADHD (Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder). For the goals of the study, all these children were considered together as they all presented a severe reading comprehension difficulty as reported by parents and teachers and confirmed by the initial assessment.

All children had received a comprehensive psychological assessment (see Table 2 ), adapted to their particular needs and ages. In particular all children had an IQ >80 assessed with the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children-IV (WISC-IV; Wechsler, 2003 ) and did not have anxiety disorders, mood affective disorders or other developmental disorders, with the exception of the cases with language disorder and the case with ADHD. Children were not receiving any additional treatment, including medication. Written consent was obtained from the children’s parents in the context of the private practice.

Table 2. Main characteristics of the sample in terms of reading and cognitive abilities.

Materials and Methods

Pre-/post-test assessment and procedure of the training.

Each child started a training program through the distance rehabilitation platform Ridinet, using the Cloze app, after the assessment of learning and cognitive abilities, including comprehension assessment with two texts, one narrative and one informative ( Cornoldi and Carretti, 2016 ; Cornoldi et al., 2017 ). Connection to the Ridinet web site was required in order to access to the app, three or four times a week for more or less 15/20 min. The period of use was of 3 months for 6 children and 4 months for 22 children. After this period children’s comprehension was assessed again. Additionally, some questions were asked to parents and children about the app’s utility and pleasantness. In particular, children were asked: “Do you think the program helped you improve your text comprehension skills?,” “Did you like doing this program instead of the same exercises on paper?”; and parents were asked: “Was it difficult to start the Cloze activities on days when it had to be done?,” “Compared to the beginning of the treatment, how do you currently judge the ability of your child to understand the texts?”. For all questions, except the last one, the answer had to be given on a 5-point scale with 1 = not at all, 2 = a little, 3 = enough, 4 = very, 5 = very much. For the last question the answer changed on a 4-point scale with 1 = got worse, 2 = unchanged, 3 = slightly improved, and 4 = greatly improved.

Comprehension Tasks

Reading comprehension was assessed with two texts, the first narrative and the other informative, taken from Italian batteries for the assessment of reading ( Cornoldi and Carretti, 2016 ; Cornoldi et al., 2017 ). The texts range between 226 and 455 words in length, and their length increases with school grade (in order to have texts and questions matching the degrees of expertise at different grades the batteries include a different pair of texts for each grade). Students read the text in silence at their own pace, then answer a variable number of multiple-choice questions (depending on school grade), choosing one of four possible answers. There is no time limit, and students can reread the text whenever they wish. The final score is calculated as the total number of correct answers for each text. Alpha coefficients, as reported by the manuals, range between 0.61 and 0.83. For the purposes of the study we decided to use the same two comprehension texts, at pre-test and post-test, as the procedure offered the opportunity of directly examining and showing to parents changes in comprehension and previous evidence had shown the absence of relevant retest effects with this material in a retest carried out after 3 months ( Viola and Carretti, 2019 ).

Distance Rehabilitation Program: Cloze

Cloze ( Cornoldi and Bertolo, 2013 ) is an app for the promotion of text comprehension with the specific aim to recover processes of lexical and semantic inference. At each work session the child works with texts that lack words and must complete the empty spaces by choosing the correct alternative from those automatically proposed by the app, so that the text becomes congruent. The program is adaptive, as text complexity and proportion of missing words vary according to the previous level of response, and is designed for children who have weaknesses in written text comprehension, mainly due to poor skills in lexical and semantic inferential processes. The app also allows to enhance a set of language skills (phonology, syntax, semantics) which contribute to ensuring the fluidity of text and production processing. The recommended age range for the use of this program is between 7 and 14 years. In this study the semantic mode (only content words may be missing and no syntactic cues can be used for deciding between the alternatives) was proposed to 21 children and the syntactic mode (where all words may be missing) to 7 children. The mode type selected for each child depends from the performance at pre-test and diagnosis. A clinician, co-author of the present study (LB), monitored the child’s results and activities with the app and sent him/her from time to time some motivational messages. The motivational messages were typically sent once a week for congratulating with children for the work done and check with him/her possible problems emerged. Training lasted from 3 to 4 months and involved between 3 and 4 sessions of 15–20 min per week. The variation in duration depended on the decision of each individual family. In fact, children were required to use the software for about 4 months or in any case for a minimum period of 3 months (choice made by six families).

Effects on Reading Comprehension of Cloze Training

All analyses were carried out with SPSS 25 ( IBM Corp, 2017 ). A preliminary analysis found that all the examined variables met the assumptions of normality (K-S between 0.106 and 0.143, p > 0.05). Then, we compared the reading comprehension performance of children before and after the computerized training with Cloze . For this analysis, a repeated measure Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) was conducted on comprehension scores to examine the differences in the whole group of children between the scores obtained before and after the training. A significant difference was found for both comprehension texts [ F (1,27) = 22.37, p < 0.001, η 2 p = 0.453 and F (1,27) = 38.90, p < 0.001, η 2 p = 0.599, respectively]. Possible differences between the two training modalities (semantic vs syntactic) and between different training periods (3 months vs 4 months) were then analyzed; no significant differences emerged between groups in both cases [ F (1,27) < 1].

Secondly, to analyze the role of individual differences at pre-test, the standardized training gain score (STG; Jaeggi et al., 2011 ) – computed by subtracting post-test score minus pre-test score, divided by the SD of the pre-test – was calculated for the two texts comprehension. Pearson correlations were computed between the STG and the variable collected at pre-test (reading speed and errors, WISC IV – Full scale IQ, Verbal Comprehension, Perceptual Reasoning, Working Memory and Processing Speed indexes). The only significant correlation was between STG of the narrative text and Verbal Comprehension Index of the WISC-IV Scale ( r = 0.38, p = 0.048). Finally, individual improvements from pre- to post-test were also confirmed considering changes in performance in terms of standard deviation in relations to norms (provided by the manual). Table 3 shows the number of children for each comprehension text who improved their performance moving from a performance at least 2 standard deviations or between 1 and 2 negative standard deviations under the mean to a performance above one negative standard deviation.

Table 3. Changes in performance in relations to norms (provided by the manual) after the training program Cloze.

Perceived Utility, Pleasantness, Parents and Child’s Improvements of Cloze

Results concerning the answers of parents and children about utility, pleasantness and self-perceived efficacy of the app, were also analyzed. At the first question, addressing children’s perceived improvement in comprehension skills, more than half of the sample chose the alternatives “very” or “very much” (15 “very” and 5 “very much”), only 1 child answered “a little” and the others chose “enough.” At the second question, about the pleasure of doing this kind of activity instead of pen and paper activities, all children answered “very” or “very much.” Concerning parents’ questions, at the first question about the difficulty to start the Cloze activity, only one parent answered “enough,” a quarter of the sample chose “a little” (seven families) and all the other 20 families chose the alternative “not at all.” At the last question about the perceived training efficacy on their child’s performance, the large majority of the families chose “slightly improved” or “greatly improved” and only three parents thought their children’s ability had remained unchanged. However, no correlations between parents and child’s perceived improvements and STG in reading comprehension were found.

The present study examined the effects of the use of Cloze , a distance rehabilitation program focused on inference skills, for improving reading comprehension, on the basis of the hypothesis that, being inference making related to reading comprehension at different ages (e.g., Oakhill and Cain, 2012 ), positive effects of the training activities on reading comprehension should be found.

Concerning the efficacy of computer-assisted training programs, literature highlights that many training programs are devised for an educational context. Results are generally encouraging with positive effects on reading comprehension, measured with materials different from those practiced during the training. However, few studies analyzed the efficacy in children with specific reading comprehension problems, and no studies considered the possibility of carrying out a training at home under the distance supervision of an expert. The latter characteristics are those that make the Cloze peculiar compared to the existent literature. Cloze is indeed based on a rehabilitation online platform which allows the child to complete personalized training activities several times a week, without moving from his/her home, and concurrently enabling the clinician to monitor the child’s progress or manage activities’ characteristics. The advantage of this procedure is twofold: on one hand it increases the potential number of training sessions per week, on the other hand it permits to save the necessary time to reach the center for rehabilitation and to reduce the costs of the intervention.

The preliminary data on Cloze were generally positive: children, working on either two slightly different versions of the same program, showed a generalized improvement in reading comprehension tasks and, together with their families, expressed appreciation for the pleasantness and the efficacy of the program. Encouraging results emerged also from the analysis of individual improvements referring to normative scores, as reported in Table 3 : most of the children’s performance migrated from a highly negative level to an average level.

It is noticeable that the efficacy of the training was assessed with materials different from those practiced during the training sessions, since reading comprehension tasks required to read a paper text and complete a series of multiple-choice questions. In future studies it would be interesting to analyze the effects of the program on skills known to be related to text comprehension, such as vocabulary or comprehension monitoring, for example. There is good reason to believe that since these variables are highly predictive of comprehension skills (and given that training in these skills sometimes improve comprehension; e.g., Beck et al., 1982 ; see also Hulme and Snowling, 2011 ), training that specifically targets comprehension might, in turn, lead to improvements in vocabulary or comprehension monitoring skills. Further studies are needed to explore this hypothesis.

A second relevant finding of the present study is the presence of a positive correlation between the gain obtained in one of the reading comprehension text (the narrative one) and the Verbal Comprehension Intelligence Quotient (VCIQ) index of the WISC-IV battery, showing that children who started with more resources in verbal intelligence achieved greater improvements in text comprehension at least with one type of text through the Cloze . The activities probably required to develop some kind of strategies, and for this reason students with larger verbal intellectual resources, who were presumably more able to develop new strategies, were more advantaged. Indeed, this amplification effect is usually found when training activities require the development of strategies ( von Bastian and Oberauer, 2014 ). Such result has clinical and educational implications, inviting professionals and teachers to consider children’s starting resources and, if necessary, to combine activities conducted through distance rehabilitation programs with personal intervention sessions that could teach strategies and promote a metacognitive approach to reading comprehension. However, some limitations of the present study must be acknowledged. Firstly, study did not include a control group, therefore findings should be taken with caution, although normative data and previous results obtained with the same test offer support to the robustness of our results and the use of normative data offers a control measure of how reading comprehension skills are acquired in typically developing children without specific training, therefore functioning as a sort of passive control group. Secondly, the treated group, although characterized by a common reading comprehension difficulty, was partly heterogeneous, as children attended different grades and could have different diagnoses. Unfortunately, the limited number of subjects, with the consequence that it was not possible to form groups defined both by the grade and the diagnosis, did not permit to make analyses taking into account the grade and the diagnosis as between-subjects factors. Future studies should examine a more homogeneous population or consider a larger sample of children, giving more information about the efficacy of training in different children population. Additionally, the fact that the treatment was concluded with the post-training assessment did not offer the opportunity to further examine the procedure and maintenance effects with a follow-up. Despite the limitations, this study offers evidence concerning the efficacy of new methods, based on computer-assisted training programs that could be beneficial in training high-level skills such as comprehension and inference generation. Such tools can be extremely worthwhile for struggling readers who may need to receive further attention in mastering higher level reading comprehension.

Data Availability Statement

The datasets generated for this study are available on request to the corresponding author.

Ethics Statement

Ethical review and approval was not required for the study on human participants in accordance with the local legislation and institutional requirements. Written informed consent to participate in this study was provided by the participants’ legal guardian/next of kin. Written informed consent was obtained from the individual(s) for the publication of any potentially identifiable images or data included in this article.

Author Contributions

AC, CC and BC contributed to the design and implementation of the research. LB provided the data. BC organized the database. AC performed the statistical analysis. ED did the literature research and wrote the section about the review of the literature. AC and BC wrote the other sections. CC contributed to the manuscript revision, read and approved the submitted version.

The present work was carried out within the scope of the research program Dipartimenti di Eccellenza (art.1, commi 314-337 legge 232/2016), which was supported by a grant from MIUR to the Department of General Psychology, University of Padua and partially supported by a grant (PRIN 2015, 2015AR52F9_003) to Cesare Cornoldi funded by the Italian Ministry of Research and Education (MIUR).

Conflict of Interest

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

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Woolley, G. (2011). “Reading comprehension,” in Reading Comprehension: Assisting Children With Learning Difficulties , ed Springer Science+Business Media (Dordrecht, NL: Springer), doi: 10.1007/978-94-007-1174-7_2

Yuill, N., and Oakhill, J. (1988). Effects of inference awareness training on poor reading comprehension. Appl. Cogn. Psychol. 2, 33–45. doi: 10.1002/acp.2350020105

Keywords : reading comprehension, training, distance rehabilitation program, digital device, Cloze app

Citation: Capodieci A, Cornoldi C, Doerr E, Bertolo L and Carretti B (2020) The Use of New Technologies for Improving Reading Comprehension. Front. Psychol. 11:751. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.00751

Received: 20 November 2019; Accepted: 27 March 2020; Published: 23 April 2020.

Reviewed by:

Copyright © 2020 Capodieci, Cornoldi, Doerr, Bertolo and Carretti. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) . The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

*Correspondence: Agnese Capodieci, [email protected] ; Laura Bertolo, [email protected]

Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

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• Professional learning

Teach. Learn. Grow.

Teach. learn. grow. the education blog.

The science of teaching reading comprehension

We think about reading comprehension as the product of word recognition and language comprehension. Nationally, we’ve done a great job getting the word out on the importance of phonics. This is, arguably, the easiest part of the equation to get right. However, that’s not all that needs to happen in the early years so students are successful readers later on.

Two pathways to teaching reading comprehension

We at NWEA recently spoke with Natalie Wexler, an education writer and author of The Knowledge Gap: The Hidden Cause of America’s Broken Education System—And How to Fix It . Natalie reminds us that “We really have to see literacy developing along two pathways that are going to be, to some extent, pretty separate in the early years.”

These pathways are word recognition and language comprehension. While phonics has a mound of intervention research on how to effectively get students to reading fluency, cognitive science tells us that students need to acquire plenty of knowledge to be able to understand the texts they encounter, and that this must start early on. Otherwise, the opportunity gaps between kids with experiences to gain background knowledge and kids without will only grow wider.

In the early years, these pathways to becoming a reader are largely separate. Younger students or older readers with decoding difficulties won’t yet be able to read texts that are building their vocabulary and knowledge. They need to have these rich and complex texts read aloud to them. What does this mean for educators? Both paths need to be effectively taught for the best chance of literacy success in the upper elementary grades and later in life. One doesn’t come before the other—decoding and comprehension both must be valued in the early grades—and both must have adequate instructional time devoted.

What is reading comprehension?

Natalie says, “we have to think of reading comprehension as a process.” Sometimes you may hear teachers asking comprehension questions about a text to students. This is thinking of comprehension as a product, not a process. Assessing students’ comprehension of a text by asking them questions is not the same as teaching students to comprehend.

Comprehension is a metacognitive skill, one that is developed through purposely choosing text sets to build knowledge and leveraging specific reading comprehension strategies to help students acquire this knowledge and apply these metacognitive skills on their own.

So how do we go about building knowledge?

Reading strategies should not be the focus of teaching reading comprehension. Instead, they should be used in service of teaching students new content. The most recent research suggests we use three strategies to help students learn the content of the texts they are reading. Specifically, when combined with instruction in vocabulary and background knowledge, these strategies are most helpful in building student knowledge and understanding. We can teach students to:

• Identify the text structure
• Using the text structure, identify the main idea
• Summarize a text by expanding on the main idea

If students can summarize a text, they now have a situation model to work from. Think of it like helping them build a web of Velcro that all the details in the text can stick to. Teaching students to use these steps will help them build the metacognitive muscles they’ll need to do this type of understanding on their own. By helping students arrive at a coherent understanding, teachers position readers to do the deep work of making inferences, generating questions, and making connections.

Imagine, for example, a class of first-grade students learning about animals and their habitats in science. They read an informational text about owls. Their teacher may then plan to use the book Owl Moon by Jane Yolen to help students step into the role of the child protagonist who is going owling for the first time. Their teacher may refer to what the students learned about owls’ eyesight and sleeping patterns from the informational text. With these goals in mind, the teacher may use various reading strategies and activities to help students understand what they are reading and gain knowledge about animals and their habitats.

Before reading , the teacher may activate students’ background knowledge from the earlier lesson by asking questions like, “What are the ‘special powers’ we learned about owls yesterday?” and “What are owls’ sleeping patterns like?” Activating these concepts will help students make connections during the narrative story. The teacher may also focus students on a problem–solution sentence stem or a narrative story map to help them better understand the plot. The work could be displayed on an anchor chart in a student-friendly format so the class can take notes together. This could transition to students taking brief notes on a graphic organizer or dry-erase board once they are more independent spellers, typically toward the middle of the year.

During reading , the teacher may ask connecting questions to help solidify knowledge, such as, “When did this happen?” and “Why do you think Pa chose to take them owling so late?” The teacher may also highlight the meaning of unfamiliar vocabulary that is related to understanding the content, such as “pine trees,” “meadow,” or “clearing.” The teacher can list these words on index cards so students can refer to them and use them in their writing throughout the unit. As they encounter a plot element, they can record it together on their graphic organizer.

After reading , the class could talk about the plot structure and use the completed graphic organizer or sentence stems to summarize the story. The teacher could also have students add descriptive words about the owl’s habitat to their science journal. This could be extended to a few sentences to explain why it was so difficult to find an owl. Students may also be guided to use a graphic organizer to compare their learning about the owl habitat to the habitat of a field mouse they explored while reading Frederick by Leo Lionni.

Notice that each of the strategies and activities—from recognizing a story’s structure, to summarizing, to eliciting details and answering questions, to comparing and contrasting—are all in service of learning content related to the science unit on animals and their habitats. The focus of reading a new text is not on learning a certain strategy but using the strategies to learn the content.

Natalie notes, “There is evidence that teaching kids comprehension strategies, or at least certain kinds of comprehension strategies, does boost their comprehension. But we’ve been trying to do this in the abstract… What really will work better is teaching a topic and bringing in whatever strategy or skill is appropriate to help kids think deeply about that topic and understand that text for that topic.”

Recommendations for teachers

When teaching reading comprehension, I encourage teachers to avoid choosing texts to focus on a particular comprehension skill or strategy. Choose texts instead based on the content focus. Here are some suggestions for how to align your instructional focus with best practices in reading science:

• Plan to use texts that revolve around a specific science or social studies topic. These can be both narrative and informational texts, as in the narrative example I shared earlier. Using texts around a common topic enables students to build a rich and enduring web of knowledge.
• Teach students to identify the text structure and generate a main idea statement. This enables students to understand and summarize what they are reading more easily. When students understand the main idea of a text, it empowers them to move into higher levels of understanding.
• Explicitly teach and review new vocabulary that relates back to the science or social studies topic. Help students understand how these words relate to one another and the topic at hand. Research in cognitive science suggests using distributed practice enables students to learn more words and, therefore, understand more concepts.

Recommendations for school administrators

If you’re a school administrator, here are some ways to support your teachers in this work of shifting from a strategy focus to a content focus when teaching reading comprehension:

• Provide teachers with high-quality text sets for read-alouds related to your grade-level science and social studies standards. In second grade and up, also provide multiple copies of chapter books around these topics for students to discuss in small groups or as a whole-class book study.
• Provide teachers high-quality professional learning and time to plan. Teachers need to be able to think deeply with one another about the vocabulary to highlight and strategies to use to help students acquire information and learn new concepts. Use practitioner articles to guide PLCs in integrating new practices into your existing curricula.
• Create a culture of collaboration. Give time for art, music, PE, and other shared-subjects teachers to plan lessons around the topic of study. Students are more likely to learn deeply when they are building common knowledge across class periods.

To hear more from Natalie on the importance effectively teaching reading comprehension, watch our interview with her.

For additional ideas and tips on literacy instruction from Teach. Learn. Grow. authors, browse our archive of ELA posts .

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Research Zeroes In on a Barrier to Reading (Plus, Tips for Teachers)

How much background knowledge is needed to understand a piece of text? New research appears to discover the tipping point.

By now, you’ve probably heard of the baseball experiment. It’s several decades old but has experienced a resurgence in popularity since Natalie Wexler highlighted it in her best-selling new book, The Knowledge Gap .

In the 1980s, researchers Donna Recht and Lauren Leslie asked middle school students to read a passage describing a baseball game, then reenact it with wooden figures on a miniature baseball field. They were surprised by the results: Even the best readers struggled to re-create the events described in the passage. 

“Prior knowledge creates a scaffolding for information in memory,” they explained after seeing the results. “Students with high reading ability but low knowledge of baseball were no more capable of recall or summarization than were students with low reading ability and low knowledge of baseball.”

That modest experiment kicked off 30 years of research into reading comprehension, and study after study confirmed Recht and Leslie’s findings: Without background knowledge, even skilled readers labor to make sense of a topic. But those studies left a lot of questions unanswered: How much background knowledge is needed for better decoding? Is there a way to quantify and measure prior knowledge?

A 2019 study published in Psychological Science is finally shedding light on those mysteries. The researchers discovered a “knowledge threshold” when it comes to reading comprehension: If students were unfamiliar with 59 percent of the terms in a topic, their ability to understand the text was “compromised.”

In the study, 3,534 high school students were presented with a list of 44 terms and asked to identify whether each was related to the topic of ecology. Researchers then analyzed the student responses to generate a background-knowledge score, which represented their familiarity with the topic. 

Without any interventions, students then read about ecosystems and took a test measuring how well they understood what they had read.

Students who scored less than 59 percent on the background-knowledge test also performed relatively poorly on the subsequent test of reading comprehension. But researchers noted a steep improvement in comprehension above the 59 percent threshold—suggesting both that a lack of background knowledge can be an obstacle to reading comprehension, and that there is a baseline of knowledge that rapidly accelerates comprehension.

Why does background knowledge matter? Reading is more than just knowing the words on the page, the researchers point out. It’s also about making inferences about what’s left off the page—and the more background knowledge a reader has, the better able he or she is to make those inferences.

“Collectively, these results may help identify who is likely to have a problem comprehending information on a specific topic and, to some extent, what knowledge is likely required to comprehend information on that topic,” conclude Tenaha O'Reilly, the lead author of the study, and his colleagues.

5 Ways Teachers Can Build Background Knowledge 

Spending a few minutes making sure that students meet the knowledge threshold for a topic can yield outsized results. Here’s what teachers can do:

• Mind the gap: You may be an expert in civil war history, but be mindful that your students will represent a wide range of existing background knowledge on the topic. Similarly, take note of the cultural, social, economic, and racial diversity in your classroom. You may think it’s cool to teach physics using a trebuchet, but not all students have been exposed to the same ideas that you have.
• Identify common terms in the topic. Ask yourself, “What are the main ideas in this topic? Can I connect what we’re learning to other big ideas for students?” If students are learning about earthquakes, for example, take a step back and look at what else they should know about—perhaps Pangaea, Earth’s first continent, or what tectonic plates are. Understanding these concepts can anchor more complex ideas like P and S waves. And don’t forget to go over some broad-stroke ideas—such as history’s biggest earthquakes—so that students are more familiar with the topic.
• Incorporate low-stakes quizzes. Before starting a lesson, use formative assessment strategies such as entry slips or participation cards to quickly identify gaps in knowledge.
• Build concept maps. Consider leading students in the creation of visual models that map out a topic’s big ideas—and connect related ideas that can provide greater context and address knowledge gaps. Visual models provide another way for students to process and encode information, before they dive into reading.
• Sequence and scaffold lessons. When introducing a new topic, try to connect it to previous lessons: Reactivating knowledge the students already possess will serve as a strong foundation for new lessons. Also, consider your sequencing carefully before you start the year to take maximum advantage of this effect.  

Theories of Reading Comprehension

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Think Again: Should Elementary Schools Teach Reading Comprehension?

For decades, conventional wisdom held that reading comprehension depended on the acquisition of isolatable, teachable, and generalizable skills, such as “finding the main idea.” This notion led to the widespread adoption of many dubious practices, often united in the “workshop model,” including giving students their choice of books that supposedly matched their reading level, devoting large stretches of class time to “sustained silent independent reading,”  and focusing too much attention on reading comprehension “skills and strategies.”

In this policy brief, Daniel Buck challenges this orthodoxy, arguing that once students have learned to decode, reading with understanding depends more on broad knowledge of the world than generalizable skills. To improve student comprehension, teachers and schools must do their best to impart such knowledge through systematic exposure to history, literature, science, and other subjects.

Download the brief here or read below.

Executive Summary

The conventional wisdom among educators and literacy gurus is that reading comprehension depends on the acquisition of isolatable, teachable, and generalizable skills. Consequently, many elementary and middle school English classrooms follow the “reading workshop” model, an approach to literacy instruction with several variations that typically involve teachers spending a few minutes modeling a supposedly important skill before sending students off to practice by reading self-selected but appropriately “leveled” books.

This policy brief challenges that orthodoxy. It asserts that, once students have learned to decode, reading books and other texts of any purported “level” with understanding depends more on knowledge than skills and that successful knowledge building requires explicit, carefully sequenced and paced, teacher-directed instruction across multiple subjects, including but not limited to social studies, science, and literature.

Key Questions

Q1: Does reading comprehension depend on acquiring a set of teachable skills?

Answer: Not really. While core “decoding” skills are clearly essential, comprehending decoded text depends mostly on broad knowledge of the world.

Q2: Do students need practice with “just right” books?

Answer: Not for that purpose. In general, the difficulty of texts is less important than the content students learn from them.

Q3: Does letting students choose the books they read foster the motivation necessary to improve reading comprehension?

Answer: To a certain extent. But in the long run, giving students too much discretion will limit their exposure to challenging texts and vital content knowledge.

Q4: Does extended literacy instruction enhance reading comprehension?

Answer: Potentially, assuming the additional time is not spent on independent reading. To become strong readers, students need the background knowledge that comes from systematic exposure to history, science, and other subjects.

The Bottom Line

Reading comprehension depends on the acquisition of decoding, vocabulary, and knowledge, not “comprehension skills” as such. Yet the instructional practices and curricula that are the foundation for many English classrooms assume otherwise. How to alter that situation for the benefit of students is an important challenge for education leaders and policy makers.

Recommendations

1. Include essential content in state standards in a coordinated way across multiple subjects.

2. Require the adoption and use of knowledge-rich curricula.

3. Ensure that state and local accountability systems incentivize the deployment and consumption of knowledge-rich curricula.

4. Emphasize the importance of knowledge building in teacher preparation and development.

Introduction

We tend to conceive of struggling readers as lacking basic decoding skills and phonemic awareness, so busy stumbling over simple words that they can’t really attend to comprehension. Yet for every kid who struggles to decode, there’s another who reads fluently but betrays a lack of understanding.

As with most educational failures, this is partly about the adults. For decades, teachers of K–12 English and language arts have been taught that reading comprehension is a constellation of teachable skills and that imparting those skills to students is the surest way to assure their comprehension of whatever they read. Less-skilled readers fail to use strategies such as asking questions, monitoring comprehension, and making inferences, the thinking goes, so to help them improve, teachers must model those skills and provide substantial time to practice them. This approach is the basis for the ubiquitous “ reader’s workshop ” or “ workshop model ,” a varied classroom model wherein a teacher typically spends a few minutes modeling a skill before sending students off to read self-selected books independently, after which they may come together in groups to discuss what they’ve read. [1] [2]

Yet, as explained below, this conception of reading is the product of flawed assumptions. To be sure, students benefit from some instruction in comprehension skills and strategies. But in practice, putting too much emphasis on these elements is counterproductive, especially insofar as it leaves students without the knowledge they need to comprehend many of the texts they will encounter.

Q1: Does reading comprehension depend on a set of teachable skills?

The prevailing view of reading comprehension began to form in the 1970s and 1980s, as researchers investigated the cognitive processes that humans use to think. In the Handbook of Research on Reading Comprehension , researchers Janice Dole, Jeffery Nokes, and Dina Drits define cognitive skills and strategies as “mental routines or procedures for accomplishing cognitive goals like solving a problem, studying for a test, or understanding what is being read.”  [3] Less-skilled readers lack these abilities, according to the authors, so teachers need to provide “declarative knowledge” about what the strategies are and “procedural knowledge” about how to apply them. [4]

This view reached its apotheosis in April 2000 when the National Reading Panel released its report Teaching Children to Read . Formed in 1997 at the behest of Congress and housed in the National Institutes of Health, this panel of experts reviewed the research on literacy instruction and produced an influential report on the importance of fluency, phonics, and vocabulary instruction. On many of those fronts, the authors’ recommendations remain widely accepted among reading experts. However, the section of the report that dealt with reading comprehension was only partly right and led to dubious practices.

To address the research on reading comprehension, the panel reviewed 481 studies and identified sixteen categories of comprehension instruction that had received scientific review, including seven ( in bold ) that appeared to have “a firm scientific basis for concluding that they improve comprehension in normal readers.”  [5]

• Comprehension monitoring
• Cooperative learning
• Graphic organizer
• Listening actively
• Mental imagery
• Multiple strategies
• Prior knowledge
• Psycholinguistic
• Question answering
• Question generation
• Story structure
• Summarization
• Teacher preparation
• Vocabulary comprehension

Per the list, countless studies have confirmed that strategies such as encouraging mental imagery while reading , question asking , and story mapping improve subsequent reading comprehension.”  [6] [7] [8] Yet what’s rarely asked is how much skills instruction is necessary, useful, or effective. Like many medicines, reading strategies can be toxic when administered too frequently or in excessive doses—in this case, because they crowd out beneficial opportunities for students to learn content from text. And while the report acknowledges the importance of “prior knowledge,” the focus on skills and strategies ultimately swamped this vital aspect of literacy.

As early as the 90s, some researchers were noting important limitations in the research. For example, one meta-analysis found that the effects of reading comprehension strategies were far larger on researcher-designed assessments (which may be artificially aligned with the strategy) than on standardized tests (where the effects were usually statistically insignificant). [9] Nor did it seem to matter if teachers taught two, four, or ten comprehension strategies or if they increased the dosage for specific strategies. In fact, some of the studies with the greatest number of instructional sessions found null effects.

None of these findings should surprise us. Cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham has likened reading strategies to academic habits such as learning to “check your work” in math class. [10] There’s not much to it once you’ve instilled the habit, so we shouldn’t expect increasing the dosage to lead to greater returns.

More recent work also calls some of the early research into question. Several newer studies have found that strategies , including comprehension monitoring, clarifying, predicting, making connections, questioning, and summarizing, have null or very small effects on reading comprehension on standardized tests. [11] [12] [13] [14] A 2019 meta-analysis also confirmed earlier conclusions: some strategy instruction works, but effect sizes are nonsignificant on standardized tests and most strategies require only brief instruction to accomplish what they can. [15] And another meta-analysis concluded that effects could be negative if strategy instruction wasn’t paired with background knowledge instruction, which the authors defined as “teaching students vocabulary and/or content knowledge” related to the text. [16]

As that summary suggests, we must consider the opportunity cost of skills-based instruction. Most educational programming is better than nothing, so the real question is whether a skills-based approach to reading comprehension is better or worse than alternative approaches and/or uses of elementary and middle school class time.

Famously, Professor E.D. Hirsch popularized a competing conception of reading comprehension—namely, that reading depends on general knowledge of the world, rather than abstract skills. [17] Our ability to identify the main idea of a passage or make an inference, he argued, depends on our knowledge of the topic that the passage is about, not our mastery of those skills.

Perhaps the most famous piece of evidence for this knowledge-centered theory of reading comprehension is the “Baseball Study,”  [18] in which researchers gave children whose reading level and knowledge of the game varied an excerpt about baseball and then tested their comprehension. Ultimately, a child’s knowledge of baseball, not their predetermined reading ability, predicted their comprehension and recall of the story. Poor readers and good readers with high knowledge of the game performed equally, as did both sets of readers with low knowledge.

Since the Baseball Study was conducted, numerous other studies have confirmed that knowledge of a topic has a huge effect on a reader’s ability to comprehend a text.”  [19] [20] However, while there is a broad consensus among researchers that knowledge matters, empirical research on the link between knowledge-based instruction and reading comprehension is limited. [21] As proponents of this approach have noted , it is inherently difficult to study. [22] After all, knowledge of the world comes from many places—and the knowledge that school imparts is divided across multiple subjects, often taught by separate teachers—and it can take years to build the broad knowledge required to understand even a simple newspaper article.

Still, the research we do have is promising. For example, a recent meta-analysis of knowledge building during elementary literacy instruction found a significant positive effect on vocabulary and reading comprehension. [23] Such content-based instruction can include the selection of texts for their subject content (e.g., Greek myths or historical fiction); reading nonfiction texts that relate to a classroom novel (e.g., an article about life in Victorian England while reading A Christmas Carol ); discussions and activities that focus on what a text says rather than the application of strategies; and explicit vocabulary instruction.

Of the handful of studies that have investigated the effects of knowledge-based pedagogies, the most important is a six-year, small-scale, randomized-controlled trial that followed 2,300 students who applied for admission to Core Knowledge schools—a network of public charter schools that emphasized a coherent, carefully sequence, and knowledge-rich curriculum—of whom 700 were admitted via lottery. [24] When the researchers compared the performance of these students to the performance of students who didn’t gain admission, they found that attending a Core Knowledge School effectively eliminated the socioeconomic achievement gap in reading.

Other studies also suggest that a knowledge-based pedagogy can be effective. For example, in a 2009 study that split classrooms into three groups—a content-focused group, a skills-focused group, and a basal reader group [25] —students in the content group significantly outperformed their peers on more open-ended recall tasks, providing both longer and more detailed summaries. Although the study’s scope was limited to a single district (meaning its results don’t necessarily generalize to other contexts), it is one of the few experiments to directly compare the efficacy of skills- and content-based approaches.

Put simply, knowledge of the world, not generalizable reading comprehension skills, determines reading ability. The average American reader would breeze through an article on baseball but would likely struggle to comprehend a simple passage about cricket without prior exposure to terms like “run chase” and “wicket.” Embedded within any newspaper is a vast amount of assumed knowledge that journalists and op-ed writers take for granted—from the fall of the Soviet Union to “1776.” But of course, students aren’t born with this knowledge, which is why the most effective teachers build the capacity for reading comprehension by relentlessly exposing students to content-rich texts rather than teaching “reading comprehension.”

Traditionally, practitioners of the workshop model have divided texts into three levels: independent (what students can read without help), instruction (accessible with support and instruction), and frustration (so difficult that a student will struggle even with the help of a good teacher). According to the model’s proponents, students need time practicing their comprehension skills and strategies on “just right” books that are at their instructional level—that is, books that are neither too hard nor too easy. In practice, this means that many students—in some schools, most students—are taught with below-grade-level texts that expose them to easier language and different content.

There are several systems for predicting how hard texts may be based on sentence structure and vocabulary, Lexile and Guided Reading Level being among the most common. To determine a student’s score, teachers mark errors as students read aloud and then answer basic comprehension questions. Typically, students are assigned to read texts that supposedly match their reading levels. The most popular curricula actively encourage teachers to organize their classroom resources or even the classroom library by supposed textual difficulty. [26] [27]

Matching textual difficulty to a student’s competency makes intuitive sense; high schoolers need more than Dr. Seuss, and first graders needn’t struggle through Chaucer’s Canterbury Tale s in the original Middle English. Still, such leveling shouldn’t be taken too literally, especially if reading comprehension mostly depends on knowledge of specific topics as opposed to some generalizable and measurable “skill.”

Reading researcher Timothy Shanahan, one of the experts on the National Reading Panel, has traced the genesis of text leveling to a researcher named Emmet Betts and his graduate student P.A. Killgalon, who determined that students who could accurately read 95 percent of the words in a passage could answer the majority of comprehension questions. [28] Unsurprisingly, higher rates of inaccuracy were associated with a breakdown in comprehension. However, at no point did the researchers posit that teaching students at particular levels was beneficial. Rather, it was literacy gurus Irene Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell who popularized text leveling with their Guided Reading curriculum, along with fellow guru Lucy Calkins, who stressed the importance of moving students “up levels of text complexity by providing them with lots of just-right, high-interest texts and the time to read them.” [29]

Ultimately, there is little research to support this approach. For example, to defend the use of text leveling, Calkins’ Reading and Writing Workshop site invokes a research review from professor Richard Allington, but the evidence Allington cites is a series of correlational studies from the 1970s and 80s. [30] [31] For example, Allington cites a 1979 study by Linda M. Anderson, Carolyn M. Evertson, and Jere E. Brophy as evidence that students need lots of practice reading with minimal errors. [32] But in addition to being fundamentally correlational, the study only mentions reading out loud in group scenarios. [33] To conclude that students benefit from text leveling based on such paltry evidence borders on malpractice.

If anything, more recent and rigorous research that investigates text leveling—including several randomized controlled trials—demonstrates the benefits of challenging texts. For example, an interesting cluster of studies that examined “dyad reading,” where teachers pair weak readers with strong readers, found that “ students progressed more quickly by reading frustration-level materials .”  [34] [35] Similarly, one (admittedly short-term) study found that students benefited from reading instruction-level texts (i.e. texts that were supposedly too challenging) with supports such as partners or pretaught story diagrams instead of independent level texts alone. [36] Finally, one meta-analysis that examined text difficulty as it pertains to fluency—a precursor to comprehension—concluded that “our best guess is that more difficult materials would lead to greater gains in achievement.”  [37]

In fact, research suggests that other considerations matter more than textual difficulty. For example, one study found that students who were exposed to a sequenced, knowledge-centric curriculum that used challenging texts saw larger gains in fluency and comprehension than students who were exposed to a skills-centric curriculum that emphasized practicing reading comprehension strategies on leveled texts. [38] In another experiment , researchers asked students to read six texts that cohered around one idea (e.g., “birds”) or a collection of disparate topics. In their words, “Results revealed that students who read the conceptually coherent texts demonstrated more knowledge of the concepts in their texts, more knowledge of the target words in their texts, and had better recall of the novel text compared to students who read unrelated texts.”  [39] Other studies have confirmed this finding. [40]

As these examples suggest, a careful reading of the research suggests that text leveling is less important and effective than constructing a coherent instructional sequence that exposes students to a thoughtful variety of genres and related topics. In other words, rather than obsessing over textual difficulty, educators might better serve students by asking themselves other questions. For example, does our curriculum expose children to topics they might not encounter outside of school? Does it offer opportunities to discuss related historical events? Does it include significant works of literature or nonfiction that are important for understanding modern society?

Q3: Does letting students choose the books they read foster the motivation necessary to improve their reading comprehension?

Answer: To a certain extent, but in the long run, giving students too much discretion will limit their exposure to challenging texts and necessary content knowledge.

Proponents of the workshop model often claim that letting students choose the books they read will make them more motivated readers, increase the amount of time they spend reading, and improve their literacy. [41] However, embedded within this seemingly plausible theory are at least two assumptions that deserve closer examination: first, that motivation drives achievement, and second, that letting students choose books is the most effective way to motivate them.

Start with the first assumption. Although it’s certainly plausible that motivation boosts achievement, it’s equally plausible that high achievement is motivating. After all, we tend to enjoy what we’re good at (and be frustrated by activities that make us feel incompetent). In fact, there is some evidence for this view, at least in mathematics, where two longitudinal studies have found that achievement in early grades predicted motivation in later grades, but early motivation did not predict subsequent achievement. [42] [43] In reading, the research is less conclusive. One study found that the relationship between motivation and self-efficacy was reciprocal. [44] Another study drew the same conclusion but found that self-efficacy had a stronger effect on motivation than vice versa. [45] In other words, there is little evidence that motivation boosts achievement and at least some evidence that achievement boosts motivation.

The second contention, that unfettered choice is the best means to foster motivation, is equally suspect. After all, there are plenty of other mechanisms teachers can employ to improve motivation, from extrinsic motivators such as grades, to the sense of community that comes from shared reading, to connections to students’ personal experiences, and to the use of inherently interesting books. [46] Perhaps a shared reading of a classic work with an impassioned teacher, engaged classmates, and thoughtfully designed final projects is more motivating than reading a self-selected book in a lonely corner.

Regardless, many studies that ostensibly interrogate the effect of choice on motivation have designs that preclude sweeping conclusions. [47] For example, in one study about the role of student choice during free-reading time, half of participants got their top-ranked book and the other half their bottom choice. [48] But of course, being assigned a text that you have consciously ranked last is demotivating and differs fundamentally from being asked to read a teacher-selected text about which you haven’t expressed a preference. In another study , the reading of self-selected books was accompanied by the renovation of classrooms and libraries, making it impossible to determine the causative factor. [49]

The link between choice and achievement is even weaker than the link between choice and motivation. For example, one study found a positive relationship between students’ self-reported choice of books and their scores on the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (an international, standardized reading assessment), but the authors could not determine if choice caused reading achievement or if the two were merely correlated. [50] Notably, several studies that have looked at the impact of giving students choice over other instructional tasks , such as which math problems to complete or vocabulary words to learn, have found null to slightly negative effects. [51] [52] [53]

As these studies suggest, choice is one of several strategies that can increase motivation; however, it is less clear that it improves achievement, and there is reason to suspect that too much choice can be a barrier to progress. Left to his or her own devices, a student may flip through graphic novels or books about football, thus encountering neither the challenge nor the unfamiliar content required for growing knowledge—and, thus, literacy. Furthermore, it should be obvious that teachers can harness the motivational effects of choice without the academic tradeoffs. For example, one small-scale study found that students performed better on end-of-unit tests when given their choice of preapproved homework options. [54]

In short, effective teachers harness the motivational effects of choice by giving students some control over where they sit, how they spend their class time, and which book they read next, but it doesn’t follow that reading teachers should give their students carte blanche .

American elementary students spend more time in English language arts than in any other subject— about twice as much as they spend on math , up to four times as much time as they spend on social studies or science, [55] and upwards of 40 percent of their total class time. [56]

In theory, a strong focus on ELA instruction at the elementary level could be a good thing. Yet in practice, much of the typical literacy block is spent reading independently. This activity has many names—Sustained Silent Reading (SSR), Drop Everything And Read (DEAR), Silent Quiet Uninterrupted Independent Reading Time (SQUIRT)—but regardless of what it is called, it’s not clear that it is a good use of class time.

Since 1980, there have been eleven separate meta-analyses on silent reading. [57] A 2002 meta-analysis is emblematic: Effects are positive, according to the authors, but small compared to interventions such as phonics, vocabulary instruction, or repeated readings . [58] [59] In 2000, the National Reading Panel concluded that research had “not yet demonstrated” that independent reading benefited students “in a clear and convincing manner.”  [60] Similarly, a 2021 review found “no meaningful beneficial effects of independent reading on reading outcomes.”  [61]

The emphasis on silent reading makes sense if you believe that reading comprehension depends on a set of generalizable skills taught in mini lessons that students can then practice independently. Yet anyone with a knowledge-centric understanding of reading comprehension—that content knowledge, not skills, supports understanding—should have concerns. No doubt, independent reading provides some benefit (almost anything is better than nothing), but explicit, teacher-led, content-centered instruction might improve reading comprehension more. A student who spends hours reading “just-right” books of their choosing will not necessarily acquire the knowledge of science, social studies, art, and music that competent readers possess, particularly if he or she is not exposed to these things at home.

Research on the impacts of social studies and science classes supports this intuition. For example, a nationally representative study by Fordham’s Adam Tyner and early childhood researcher Sarah Kabourek found that “students who receive an additional thirty minutes of social studies instruction per day . . . outperform[ed] students with less social studies time by 15 percent of a standard deviation on the fifth-grade reading assessment”  [62] (notably, effects were particularly strong for girls and students from low-income and non-English-speaking homes).

Several smaller randomized-controlled trials dovetail with Tyner and Kabourek’s conclusions. For example, in one study , elementary students who were randomly assigned additional class time that focused on science and social studies content showed improvement in both these subjects and “reading comprehension.”  [63] Other studies that have focused on the effects of additional science instruction have found similar results. [64 ] [65] [66]

Such research tracks with what we know about reading comprehension. Just about any student could decode the words “Berlin Wall.” But to grasp their full import, a student would need a knowledge of basic geography (where is Berlin?), history (why was the Berlin wall built?), and political philosophy (what qualities of the Communist regime caused people to flee from East to West?). More time in social studies and other subjects—and an English class that makes the most of its time—is a plausible way of acquiring such knowledge.

Currently, many state standards are little more than a list of vacuous skills. For example, ELA students in Kansas are to “read and comprehend high-quality literary text,” but there is no discussion of which texts should be read at what grade level. [67] Given the importance of content knowledge, a better approach would be to specify the movements and literary periods (e.g., classical myths and American slave narratives) that all students in a particular grade level should cover or provide a list of specific texts from which teachers or districts can choose. [68]  Ideally,states would also coordinate and thereby reinforce content across multiple subjects—for example, by reading a novel set during the industrial revolution while students learn about that same period in their social studies class.

Many states now require districts to adopt K–3 curricula that align with the science of reading, but too often these requirements focus exclusively on phonics while neglecting content knowledge. What’s more, the dearth of essential content is not necessarily confined to the early grades. In many states, the work of ensuring the quality of curriculum falls to districts. Still, nineteen states and the District of Columbia already prescribe textbooks at the state level, and those same agencies could theoretically approve curricula that promote a knowledge-centric understanding of reading comprehension. [69] In the states where districts choose their curricular materials, the Knowledge Matters Campaign has begun reviewing and approving knowledge-rich curricula to provide much-needed guidance to both state and local education agencies.

Although they are often accused of narrowing the curriculum, standardized tests could be part of the solution. For example, there is no law that prevents states from embedding essential content in ELA tests—second-grade tests could include passages about ancient civilizations, for example—to incentivize ELA teachers to cover certain topics. And, in fact, Louisiana has partnered with Great Minds, NWEA, and other organizations to develop and pilot such tests. [70]

Alternatively, separate standardized tests in other subjects could directly measure historical, civic, and scientific knowledge. For example, most states already test elementary and/or middle school students in science, and about a dozen test them in social studies. [71] [72] Ideally, every state would do so.

Many states now require that teachers learn the “science of reading” in both university teacher prep programs and district-level teacher professional development. Yet if such requirements focus solely on phonics and phonemic awareness, they'll fail to teach educators the full account of how children learn to read and comprehend. [73] Moving forward, such mandates must include a cogent account of the importance of knowledge to reading comprehension, and those charged with preparing in-service educators must teach them accordingly.

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[73] Christie Ellis et al., Teacher Prep Review: Strengthening Elementary Reading Instruction (Washington, D.C.: National Council on Teacher Quality, June 2023), https://www.nctq.org/dmsView/Teacher_Prep_Review_Strengthening_Elementary_Reading_Instruction .

Acknowledgments

This report was made possible through the generous support of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation. I am grateful to Timothy Shanahan for his external review, helpful feedback, and guidance on a draft of the report. I also extend my gratitude to Pamela Tatz for copyediting. At Fordham, I would like to thank David Griffith specifically for his ongoing direction, editing, and supervision of this project, as well as Adam Tyner, Amber M. Northern, Chester E. Finn, Jr., and Michael J. Petrilli for reviewing drafts; Victoria McDougald for her role in dissemination; and Stephanie Distler for developing the report’s cover and coordinating production.

Daniel Buck is a secondary-school English teacher and freelance author.

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