Are We Teaching Reading Comprehension? Part I

  • reading comprehension
  • 15 March, 2025
  • 29 Comments

Recently, Philip Capin and his colleagues published a valuable study in Scientific Studies of Reading. This research combined data from 66 observational studies of reading. Capin and company found that 23% of reading instruction was devoted to reading comprehension, and that this amount has increased since 2000. However, they also identified some unfortunate trends.

In the 1970s, Dolores Durkin shocked the reading world when she reported the results of her landmark observational study. She revealed an appalling paucity of comprehension teaching. Her team observed almost 75 hours of reading instruction in upper elementary classrooms but only found about 20 minutes of comprehension teaching.

Some of this scarcity may be attributed to narrow definitions – or more accurately to differing conceptions as to what it means to teach comprehension. This is an issue that persists with the new study, even though it is open to a more extensive buffet of teaching moves.

Prior to the 1970s, research on the teaching of reading comprehension was almost non-existent. The few existing comprehension studies focused on reading drills aimed at teaching words or increasing reading speed. It, seemingly, never occurred to the research community that it may be possible to directly teach reading comprehension.

Of course, reading programs did not ignore the issue. Basal readers usually offered “guided reading” or “directed reading” lessons which engaged groups of students in practicing their comprehension. Students read short selections – almost always stories – that were written specifically for the purpose of teaching. Each story repeated words that had appeared earlier and introduced a few additional words, too. Teachers would teach these new words prior to the reading to ensure high comprehension. 

Additionally, relevant background information was usually presented, and teachers asked certain types of questions after portions of the texts were read. These questions allowed teachers to evaluate comprehension and were thought to provide students with valuable practice in engaging in certain kinds of productive thinking (e.g., main idea questions, drawing conclusions questions).

Durkin’s study sought something more explicit than practice, however. In her study, comprehension lessons were those in which teachers did or said “something to help children understand or work out the meaning of more than a single, isolated word” (p. 488). It also segregated instruction from assessment: if teachers did or said something “in order to learn if what was read was comprehended,” that was testing not teaching. (p. 11)

At the time of Durkin’s study, the “cognitive revolution” in psychology was in full flower. Psychologists were throwing off the shackles of behaviorism and exploring how people think. Comprehension – and attention, language processing, learning, problem-solving, and so on – came to be seen as more active processes, involving knowledge, intentionality, organization, and self-awareness. 

In that context Durkin’s definitions made some sense. Intentionality was not emphasized in any of those reading lessons. Kids would practice their reading comprehension, without any awareness of what they might be learning.

Not everyone accepted Durkin’s results. For instance, Carol Hodges (1980) thought her definition of comprehension instruction was too narrow because it did not include those question-and-answer sessions.

Capin also seems to reject the possible instructional value of quizzing kids about what they have read.  Though it does identify several specific teaching behaviors that Durkin (and Hodges) neglected: teaching word meaning knowledge, developing background/general knowledge, selecting texts to match lesson goals, establishing engaging and motivational contexts for reading, engaging students in collaborative learning, comprehension strategies, text structure, and high-quality discussions of the text content.

That’s progress, but I don’t agree with all those choices, at least as described in the study.

Some of those actions seem to be aimed more at ensuring successful comprehension practice, than in teaching students how to comprehend or how to comprehend better.

Durkin distinguished between activities that taught comprehension and those that would only allow a teacher to evaluate it.

I’m distinguishing between lessons that ensure students comprehend a specific text that is being used in the lesson, and those aimed at enabling students to comprehend other texts better in the future.

It’s not that I don’t care whether kids understand what they’re reading in their lessons. It’s just that that outcome is insufficient.

Perhaps an example would help. Students read a 2-page segment, and the teacher then asks them questions about what they read. “Why does the author say that “the Grand Canyon is an example of erosion?” Bobby responds incorrectly that it is “because there are a lot of rocks in the Grand Canyon.”

The teacher has a couple of choices here. She could ensure that Bobby and the others comprehend these sentences by asking another child for the answer or by explaining it herself. “No, Bobby, it is because the Colorado River carved the canyon, wearing down and carrying away rock.”

Instead of telling the answer, another possibility would be to take Bobby back into the text to guide him to see the connection between two key sentences – one that revealed the causes of erosion and another that explained how the Grand Canyon was formed. The sentences do not explicitly say that the Grand Canyon was caused by erosion. No, to get there a reader must recognize the connection between this explanation and the later description of the formation of the Grand Canyon. One sentence defines erosion and the other provides an example. It would help Bobby to know that authors will often define a concept and then provide an example – even if they don’t label it as an example. Readers need to learn to watch for those pairings of definitions and examples.

A good follow up might be to find more examples of this in other science articles.

Showing a student how to notice those pairings when reading can both increase comprehension of the text under study and can increase their future comprehension with other texts.  

Some of the items in the Capin list could help kids to comprehend better. Teaching vocabulary is a good example of that. Words get used again and again. The more words that readers know the meaning of, the more likely their comprehension.

Some other items in that list seem sure to improve comprehension with the lesson text, but their generalization is dubious.  Providing a motivational context for a lesson seems like an example of that.

For me, teaching reading comprehension means improving students’ abilities to read other texts – on their own – with greater understanding. That puts me at odds a bit with both these useful studies.

If the teacher’s action won’t contribute to making kids better comprehenders, then it isn’t comprehension instruction. 

What should comprehension instruction look like? I gave one simple example about erosion and the Grand Canyon earlier, and in my next blog, we’ll look at comprehension teaching with a broader lens.

References

Capin, P., Dahl-Leonard, K., Hall, C., Yoon, N. Y., Cho, E., Chatzoglou, E., Reiley, S., Walker, M., Shanahan, E., Andress, T., & Vaughn, S. (2025). Reading comprehension instruction: Evaluating our progress since Durkin’s seminal study. Scientific Studies of Reading, 29(1), 85–114. https://doi.org/10.1080/10888438.2024.2418582

Durkin, D. (1978). What Classroom Observations Reveal about Reading Comprehension Instruction. Reading Research Quarterly, 14(4), 481–533. http://www.jstor.org/stable/747260

Hodges, C. A. (1980). Commentary: Toward a Broader Definition of Comprehension Instruction. Reading Research Quarterly, 15(2), 299–306. https://doi.org/10.2307/747330

Comments

See what others have to say about this topic.

Rob Mar 15, 2025 01:53 PM

Everyone says that reading achievement rates gave declined… Which can presume that the teaching of reading was better 30 or 40 years ago. Not sure about that.

Timothy Shanahan Mar 15, 2025 02:01 PM

Rob-
National assessment scores have gone up and down (relatively small amounts) since the collection of those data began (1969). In the most recent data the scores are down. This recent decline is most likely due to the COVID disaster and its aftermath. How we teach reading and what we strive to teach with that instruction (e.g., decoding, fluency comprehension) can make a difference in student learning, but the amount of instruction that students receive has a huge impact. With the absence rates (of kids and teachers) that schools have been facing, it is predictable that we have had an achievement drop. If you want higher reading scores, we need to get everybody back to coming to school regularly.

tim

Ann Christensen Mar 15, 2025 03:07 PM

Current practice focuses on decoding with the ASSUMPTION that saying or sounding each word quickly and accurately will result in comprehension. Alas, this is not true.
Children who struggle, I have found, are frequently focused on decoding, instructed in decoding, assessed for decoding, and believe that the desired outcome of reading is saying the horizontal lists of words correctly.
Comprehension instruction and practice, with an eye to transfer, is necessary for readers to progress. Reading in science, social studies, and math are natural opportunities to teach comprehension. Read-aloud is a time to focus on comprehension.
Writing about text and writing self generated texts gives children opportunities to explore the relationship between writer and reader and to provide instruction on comprehension. Again, teaching for transfer is essential.
Current practice with exclusive use of incomprehensible decodable texts in reading allows (encourages, teaches) children that saying words is successful reading. We must be cautious and mindful of including simple, meaningful texts through which comprehension can be learned WHILE saying words.

Timothy Shanahan Mar 15, 2025 03:27 PM

Ann-
Decoding instruction is very important and needs to be there... but these days we are seeing confused school people emphasizing phonemic awareness in high school and decodable text in 2nd grade -- ignoring any research on the matter. If decoding is well taught, most students still will be benefit from reading comprehension instruction. You are absolutely correct.

tim

Marcia Long Mar 15, 2025 03:29 PM

Tim, this is extremely helpful. I work with teachers who are exhausted and very busy teaching ELA, but this will help me help them understand that much of what they are doing is not teaching reading comprehension. I find that lack of teacher training in this area and lack of understanding by administrators and district leaders is my biggest hurdle. With these types of examples and more training, I think we could make a big difference. Our students spend a lot of time in class, but they are just not getting what they need to be better readers. I can’t thank you enough for your insight. You always break research down into layman’s terms, and you have been most influential on helping me teach teachers. Thanks again.

Mark Pennington Mar 15, 2025 03:38 PM

Seems to me that teaching text structure, transitions, and varieties of sentence syntax would be some means of teaching comprehension per your example. Additionally, these means are able to be assessed with independent reading to determine degree of transfer over time.

Annette Mar 15, 2025 03:49 PM

Very interesting article; I look forward to part 2.

I teach 3rd grade. I am concerned that we may often push our students harder than what they are developmentally ready to accept with many of these higher-order thinking skills, and all for the sake of high stakes testing.

I have been trained in the Science of Reading, and see many benefits of that research. However, I can’t help but consider how vastly different my own reading instruction and reading experience were like with whole language. I learned to read (spoiler alert to revealing my age) using Dick and Jane books. Where did the comprehension develop from that type of instruction? I don’t remember being specifically taught how to discern how sentences connected or how an author connected paragraphs, yet somehow I seemed to comprehend what I was reading. Additionally, I only recall one standardized test in elementary school — The California Achievement Test. I wonder if the lack of testing pressure allowed me to develop strong reading skills at the pace appropriate for me?

Kathy Martin Mar 15, 2025 03:58 PM

Mark Pennington - I agree with the different means of teaching comprehension you mention. I'm curious about the "assessments with independent reading" you mention. What would those look like?

Jackie Bernacki Mar 15, 2025 04:41 PM

Hi Tim
I mostly struggle with finding good rich texts for this reading comprehension! Right now I tend to make my own and try to find others. But if we are to really teach it right ..we really need rich texts and I struggle to find them. Would love your thoughts on this matter !

Leslie Laud Mar 15, 2025 05:14 PM

This new study has the potential to raise outcomes for kids as Hansford's Sold a Story has done. Kudos to Dr. Shanahan for featuring it.

A growing knowledge-centric movement suggests we cannot teach transferrable strategies. This claim is wrong. It suggests that strategies do not transfer across texts and cannot be used independently to build new knowledge. No research supports this claim.

The evidence overwhelmingly shows that students can learn and apply strategies to approach unfamiliar texts—even when they have little prior knowledge of the topic.

The key word here is transferrable.

Everyone agrees that knowledge-building and rich content are essential. (Though defenders of knowledge-centric try to paint anyone raising questions as anti-knowledge or anti-curriculum. This could not be further from the truth. Those defending strategies deeply value knowledge and curriculum.)

Over the past five years, a small connected group has been promoting the idea that foregrounding knowledge-building and downplaying the role of transferrable strategies is the bst way to help students navigate new texts.

- A side impact of this group has been that programs branded 'knowledge-building' sales have skyrocketed, yet with no evidence these perform better than all core program published after 2012 when the new standards dictated that all programs must be 50/50 informational texts / narrative stories. The differences between the new 'knowledge-building' branded and these core programs are unclear and there is no evidence swapping will raise outcomes. Yet, we've been swept away purchasing them in the hopes they will do better for kids. They don't seem to.

Knowledge-building helps incrementally over time, no doubt. But strategies help immediately—and significantly. Dismissing their importance risks weakening students' ability to navigate new material independently. We cannot teach all knowledge. Students must have a way to approach new unfamiliar topics.

Some argue that we have overdone comprehension instruction, but the reality is quite the opposite—we haven’t done it enough, or at least not well enough. Too often, strategy instruction is superficial, rushed, or ineffective, rather than taught deeply and practiced until it truly transfers. That is the point of this new landmark Capin study cited here.

This is not an either/or choice. Teaching both transferrable strategies and rich content is the most effective approach. Any programs published after 2012 can be used to do this. Shiney new branded knowledge-building that dismiss strategies are unlikely to have the impact that improving how we teach strategies will, according to this study would be a fair take on it.
Strategies must be explicitly taught and practiced until students can apply them independently—because transfer isn’t just possible, it’s the goal.

Timothy Shanahan Mar 15, 2025 05:16 PM

Jackie-
Text is central when it comes to teaching reading comprehension. It is essential that the text convey content that we would want our students to know and sufficient linguistic/textual/cognitive demands that would allow us to teach students how to negotiate those. That means high quality, worthwhile text, that is sufficient difficult. (I encourage the use of programs because I think it makes it possible for teachers to work through content/text demands in systematic ways that could increase kids' chances of learning.

tim

Timothy Shanahan Mar 15, 2025 05:18 PM

Lesley--

I ungraciously didn't mention it in this blog, but your heads up on the issue is what led me to write it.

thanks.

tim

Timothy Shanahan Mar 15, 2025 05:25 PM

Annette-
Like you, I learned to read from a version of the Dick and Jane books. Those programs had very little that we would accept as comprehension instruction (as you'll see in my next blog). There is no question that we can successfully teach reading without much explicit direction in this area. However, let's not think of reading ability as a discrete skill that you either have or don't have. The issue is how well do we want our kids to read. Reading achievement in the US hasn't risen since 1970 though the demands for literacy in our society have increased considerably. Don't think of this kind of article as addressing how can we teach reading but as how can we teach reading so that larger numbers of kids get to higher levels of achievement.

thanks.

tim

Mary Baker-Hendy Mar 15, 2025 05:46 PM

Hi Tim,
I agree that teaching two sentence definition/explanation text structure supports comprehension, but I think teaching the practice of referencing text would also help. The student, who is not a practiced reader, might not notice when reading and likely would not return to text. They assume that ‘good readers' just know. Maybe the teacher could have asked the student to return to paragraph 2 of the text and pointed out the 2 sentence text structure.

But most of all the 2 page reading scenario screams the student’s vocabulary and how best to increase it. Pre-teaching the tier 2 word ‘erode’ and the tier 3 version ‘erosion’ would have helped this student understand the passage. Throwing in a little morphology would be nice too... Mary BH

Susan Mar 15, 2025 06:21 PM

Thank you for your thoughtful blog!!! I like that you are talking about explicit “how to’s” in teaching reading comprehension. I feel like there are so many materials that claim to improve comprehension, but I don’t totally buy into their proclaimed results. I liked how you described that an author often defines and gives an example and that we can teach kids to pay attention to this as a strategy of comprehension. I would like to know if you have other tactics you feel truly beneficial to comprehension. One strategy I use is telling students that there will always be a main idea of a chapter or section, there will always be details of who, what, where, when, why, and how, background information and vocabulary are critical. I also have a “plot chart” out and tell them fiction (and life) are made up of these components. I look forward to the strategies you suggest teachers should employ to improve comprehension.

Timothy Shanahan Mar 15, 2025 07:56 PM

Rosalie--
That kind of thing happens often when folks are typing on their phones. It is not carelessness as much as incoordination. I know it happens to me too.

tim

Michelle Mar 15, 2025 10:02 PM

Leslie, I couldn’t agree with you more! Funny enough, I just wrote all about the points you make on my latest blog post, which I published the day before Dr. Shanahan’s insightful (as always) words.

Lauren Mar 16, 2025 03:01 PM

Jw and Annette-

Thank you for your insights on how high stakes testing has changed. The tests now are not gaged for appropriate child development levels. I don't think you can accurately compare student achievement now with results from past assessments. As to the "Dick and Jane" books, maybe the key there was simplicity. This is a word that I think all educators should think about.
Maybe students now are forced to overthink and overanalyze everything they try to read to the point where the whole process is seen as something very unappealing. Maybe we are asking students to take on too much too fast, and the process of enjoying and understanding books becomes a lost.

Gaynor Mar 16, 2025 03:49 AM

Not knowing American literacy history, it is not possible for me to comment on what was done in the US , historically.However I do know what was happening here in NZ and what I am interested in specifically that NZ scored the highest in reading comprehension , in an international test in 1970.

After the introduction of Whole Language and Marie Clay, about 1970 , we now score the lowest in English speaking countries.

Curiously much of the comprehension material for students prior to 1970 in NZ before WL, came from America.
This included basal readers , Whole Word Ginn ,McKee etc with the readers and accompanying workbooks, the SRA , class sets , as well and other programmes like the Reader' s Digest 's Skill Builders. The main point was that there was much emphasis placed on comprehension and exercises were done everyday in classrooms. In fact some days more than one comprehension exercise was done daily since the topic of 'English ', which concentrated on written and spoken work, also included comprehension .

By no means am I the first to say writing about a topic helps you understand the concepts better. In 'English' you were required to answer conventional direct comprehension exercises like : Why does ? Where is ? When ? etc and in then write in another section , which required research of the topic , to discuss more extensive and detailed aspects of the topic covered . If the topic was house building materials , you were asked to draw a plan of of your home and list all various materials used eg. Then direction was given to write two paragraphs describing the difference between brick houses and wooden ones.

Comprehension was clearly about acquiring knowledge.

I am unashamedly a traditionalist and believe there is a trend in the West to return to a knowledge rich curriculum , structured learning in not just literacy, along with handwriting and firm discipline and some rote learning in the basics and other aspects of traditional teaching . It is what I experienced when I was a child and I saw much superior academic achievement then, than what we have now .

Look forward to part 2 of this topic.

Bronwyn Parkin Mar 16, 2025 06:58 AM

Deep comprehension requires cultural alignment: the reader's inferences align sufficiently with the author's implications to make sense. This requires deep knowledge by the teacher about authors' intentions so that rich learning dialogue can take place in the classroom. I'm particularly conscious of this from working with English as a Second Language students in cross-cultural classrooms. This knowledge goes much further than asking 'who, what, when, where, why'.
For example, here is the opening sentence from 'The Little Red Hen': 'Down the road and over the hill lived a little red hen.' You might ask 'where' and 'who', or you can explain to students that this is the sort of sentence that is typically part of a story orientation section: it begins with two 'where phrases' that describe the setting before we reach the main character; it includes the generic verb 'lived' to introduce the character; the noun group used to describe the character begins with the indefinite article 'a' to signal that we haven't previously met this hen, the adjective 'little' and the choice of 'hen' create a diminutive, female character with whom the reader can empathise. (It wouldn't work if it was a rooster.) I don't know why the hen is red except perhaps for assonance: i.e. 'red' and 'hen' share the same middle vowel that links them together.
These are examples of the sort of meaning-making that might be shared during whole class close reading, to develop common, transferable literate knowledge that students can subsequently apply in independent reading.

Jw Mar 16, 2025 01:30 PM

The end of year testing that students need to take has changed. They continue to get more and more difficult. This year our state is starting cluster tests. They look at the passages on the left side of the screen and then they answer questions with drop down answers. If they get one wrong if can effect other answers. Answers are not "right there." The majority of adults would not get the correct answer. How can people compare reading comprehension now from the past when the questions use to be choose a-d? The question now are sooo difficult I struggle getting them correct.

Lwj Mar 16, 2025 03:26 PM

One aspect that connects both knowledge based curriculum focus and comprehension focus is vocabulary. They are reciprocal concepts in a way, especially for English language development.

Berys Dixon Mar 16, 2025 09:15 PM

Let's not put all decodable texts in the same basket. Sure, the contrived tongue twistered ones have no place in the teaching of reading, let alone comprehension, but there are phonically controlled texts out there for children at all stages of learning the code that are perfectly comprehensible with natural language patterns. So very useful for students learning the hows of understanding a text in the early years.

Timothy Shanahan Mar 16, 2025 09:42 PM

Berys-

Research has found only a small benefit for a brief period of time for decodables of any kind. I think their use is being overdone by people who are ignoring the "science of reading."

tim

Gaynor Mar 17, 2025 12:11 AM

Half the time we use decodables as dictation exercises for spelling .

Miriam Trehearne Mar 17, 2025 03:56 AM

Miriam P. Trehearne

It is important for classroom teachers, administrators and parents to understand that oral language (the foundation of all literacy learning), comprehension (word and world knowledge being key components), and writing are all "curriculum gap areas"
(Teale, Paciga, and Hoffman 2007) that in general deserve much more focus at school and at home!

Thank you again and again Tim for sharing what the research really tells us!

Tom Gething Mar 17, 2025 01:03 PM

Dear Tim,

Thank you for this article on a critical subject. I really look forward to the next article, which I assume is going to be practical in the sense of sharing the key skills we need readers to have and how to teach/model these in the classroom. It may be a very rough generalization but that switch from 'learning to read' to 'reading to learn' is real and needs careful consideration.

You shared that one of the challenges in this area is researchers differing categorization of what is reading comprehension instruction and what is assessment of reading comprehension. I would love to know if there is more general consensus on what constitute the key reading comprehension skills that we need to teach students. That sort of practical listing is important for teachers and school leaders if we are to do a better job of teaching reading comprehension. The example you shared is a good case in point, because it is the sort of skill that can be practiced in every classroom. It seems to me that when we discuss transferable skills we are making the implicit statement that students transfer them from classroom to classroom. No doubt that's true, but it is most true I would guess when they have been mastered to some degree. The other way of looking at transferable skills is to think of their instruction as being transferable - I guess is what we mean when we say 'Everybody is a reading teacher'. The "Grand Canyon" example you gave in terms of content could appear in a text in a reading lesson, a social studies lesson or a science lesson. And while in many cases, particularly elementary classrooms, the same teacher may be teaching all subjects, there may well be situations where different teachers are involve, such as my school. This makes me think that we need every teacher to have some grounding in knowing and teaching effectively reading comprehension strategies. For that, we need a common understanding of what reading comprehension is and what teaching it looks like. Are we there yet? What I see among my colleagues in our school is a much richer understanding of learning to read than reading comprehension. Our collective efficacy as teachers of reading is tremendous and we take great pride in being intentional about early reading skills. We want to practice the same level of intentionality with reading comprehension.

Rachel Mar 17, 2025 09:55 PM

As teachers, we aim to teach for comprehension? If so, that makes sense to me. Thanks for the blog post.

Molly Bishop Mar 18, 2025 12:06 AM

I'm a big believer in Reuven Feuerstein's approach to teaching. He talks about 'transcendence.' Your example of talking about how to infer the author's intent, even when she doesn't state it explicitly, is an example of 'how' to read it. Giving several different examples over a period of time, is 'transcendence.' It also is more transcendent if you talk about how we infer meanings in speech. For example 'Good job!' stated in one way is friendly, but you can say it in a sarcastic way, which makes it a condescending put down. Kids know about this at every level of elementary school, but they don't always realize how this same skill (understanding the intent of a speaker/writer) is needed in reading books. I believe that all of the reliance on 'comprehension questions', instead of the teacher choosing a skill like the one you mentioned, and reading informative passages on curricular areas (like an extended unit on geology, for example).

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Are We Teaching Reading Comprehension? Part I

29 comments

One of the world’s premier literacy educators.

He studies reading and writing across all ages and abilities. Feel free to contact him.

Timothy Shanahan is one of the world’s premier literacy educators. He studies the teaching of reading and writing across all ages and abilities. He was inducted to the Reading Hall of Fame in 2007, and is a former first-grade teacher.  Read more

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