Are We Teaching Reading Comprehension? Part II – 6 Things Every Teacher Should Know

Previously, I discussed two observational studies (a landmark from the 1970s and a valuable recent effort). Both aimed to determine the amount of reading comprehension instruction in American schools. That’s an endeavor that requires clear definitions.

According to the older study conducted by Dolores Durkin (1978), comprehension instruction included any action teachers took to help children “understand or work out the meaning of more than a single, isolated word.” The newer study, this one by Philip Capin and colleagues (2024), didn’t provide a definition as much as a list of acceptable actions: teaching word meaning knowledge, developing background knowledge, selecting texts to match lesson goals, establishing engaging and motivational contexts for reading, engaging students in collaborative learning, teaching comprehension strategies, teaching text structure, and high-quality discussions of text content.

Durkin explicitly rejected the post-reading question-and-answer sessions so common in schools. To her, that was assessment only, not instruction. Capin accepted the value of high-quality discussion but distinguished that from the more typical quiz show routines that accompany reading.

RELATED: Are We Teaching Reading Comprehension? Part I

Neither study homed in on the most essential feature of comprehension teaching. It is insufficient to enable students to understand a story or article. If the aim isn’t to alter reading behaviors for future texts, then it isn’t comprehension instruction. Reading practice is not enough.

Here are 6 important things that everyone should know about comprehension teaching.

1.        Amount of comprehension instruction

Both studies claimed there was not enough comprehension instruction. By Durkin’s definition, there was almost zero such teaching, though it increased considerably when those Q&A sessions were counted (Hodges, 1980). Capin found that 23% of reading instruction focused on comprehension.

I’ve long argued for at least 2 hours per day for reading/writing/spelling/language instruction, with a quarter of that devoted to comprehension.

Given that, I don’t think our problem is too little comprehension time. No, it’s that almost any kind of reading practice is claimed to build comprehension. Teachers have kids read texts. They ask questions to be sure the kids understood those texts. They might even do some other things – teaching the meanings of some of the words, providing relevant background information, and so on. Those actions are almost certain to ensure comprehension of the instructional text, but let’s be honest. They have little likelihood of any generalizable impact.  

2.        The centrality of text

The Capin study credited the value of using texts relevant to the purposes of instruction. That inclusion deserves a hug!

A good deal of reading comprehension instruction should take the form of directed reading – with a teacher guiding a group of students through a shared text. These communally read texts determine what can be taught. Given the wide range of things that readers need to learn, these texts must do double and triple duty. Too often they are chosen to support narrow aspects of the curriculum.

For instance, publishers are scrambling to ensure that reading texts expose kids to lots of information. Knowledge is in right now.

But there is more to it than that.

I’m happy to see science and history selections in the reading books. These subjects have been too long ignored. Unfortunately, these programs seem to espouse the idea that social studies and science provide “knowledge,” but literature does not. That’s a big mistake.

However, even if stories and poetry are in, knowledge should not be the only concern when selecting texts for comprehension instruction.

Students should learn to read narratives, expositions, and arguments, and to surmount the varied demands of different genres, rhetorical structures, and text conventions. Children need to be reading books that expose them to those kinds of text features and formats, and they should receive instructional guidance on how to read them.

Another important consideration is the challenge level of these instructional texts. Teachers have been told to teach with books at the students’ instructional levels, texts that could be read with 75-89% comprehension with no teacher support. The idea of that has been to ensure comprehension, but it is comprehension of texts the students can already read reasonably well.  

That’s just the opposite of what is needed (Shanahan, 2025). Kids should be grappling with books they cannot read well, and instruction should help transform those into something comprehensible, without the teacher reading the books to the kids or telling them what they say.

3.        Language comprehension

You can’t tell from either the Durkin or Capin studies – or from lots of other work on reading comprehension – that language matters. Durkin specifically rejects vocabulary instruction as comprehension pedagogy, while Capin et al. includes both vocabulary and text structure.

Much vocabulary instruction focuses on teaching students the meanings of words from the instructional texts, efforts mainly aimed at ensuring success with those texts. That would seem too narrow to count as comprehension instruction by my definition. However, it doesn’t matter why students are learning word meanings, since any word could come up in a future text.

I would count such vocabulary teaching as part of comprehension, though to be fair these lessons are often conceived and delivered so poorly that perhaps it shouldn’t count as teaching at all. For one thing, introducing those words is not likely to lead to long term learning. Any vocabulary that is introduced, needs to be reviewed frequently and kids need to be induced to use these words in their talking and writing.

Another problem with this pre-teaching is that much of it is useless. The words selected for teaching may be defined explicitly in the text. Instead of guiding kids to recognize and make sense of the definitions in the text (reading comprehension), the preteaching encourages kids to ignore the text.

The same can be said for words that may not be defined explicitly but that could be figured out from context, morphology, or the use of a dictionary. Telling those word meanings may discourage the use of those essential tools and won’t teach students how to use them.  

Of course, language depends on more than words. Words are organized into sentences and there are rules or conventions that dictate relationships among words. Formal grammar instruction may not improve reading comprehension, but there is extensive research showing that kids struggle to understand complex sentences and that applied grammar instruction (e.g., guiding students to figure out the meaning of sentences) can improve it.

The same can be said about cohesion. To comprehend text, readers must track the relationships of ideas across text (e.g., pronouns, synonyms, conjunctions). Cohesion can be an important source of confusion, and it can be taught profitably. Text organization is another way that ideas connect across text, and Capin and company wisely included this as a component of comprehension instruction.

I don’t know if any of these observational studies saw such teaching of language, but it is clear from scads research that they should have beent.

4.        The Development of Knowledge

Research shows that reading comprehension depends on knowledge. Readers use knowledge to make sense of the information in texts. The knowledge a reader brings to a text can reduce the cognitive load required to comprehend, it can be the source of inferences, and it can help with long term recall of the information gained from the text.

Research shows that getting kids to think about what they already know about the text topic before they read, or increasing what the students know about the topic, can improve comprehension of that text.

But does it have a general impact on reading comprehension? That is less clear.

Unfortunately, research studies do not yet show wide transferability, though some recent research (Kim, 2024) suggests that it may be possible – but that takes more than just accumulating bits of information.

“Knowledge oriented” reading programs so far do not appear to be especially effective. This may be like vocabulary, however. Vocabulary teaching can have a positive impact on the comprehension of any texts that use those particular words. Building knowledge on certain topics within reading lessons may improve future comprehension with texts on those topics, but without a more general payoff.

I think reading lessons should aim to ensure that the students gain content from the texts used for reading comprehension. That means both ensuring that the texts used for this teaching are rich and informative, and that there is sufficient reading, discussion, and writing about those ideas to ensure learning. Nevertheless, at this point, building knowledge, per se, should not count as reading comprehension instruction. 

5.        Executive Function

Executive function refers to processes used to manage or direct our cognition. Executive function allows you to focus your attention on one thing and not another or to remember something and ignore something else. Reading comprehension like any cognitive activity falls under the control of this executive function.

There are many ways that instruction can address this: teaching students to try to comprehend (increasing intentionality) and how to comprehend (how to intentionally take comprehension supportive actions), and how to monitor success (recognizing when they’re comprehending and when they’re not, and how to fix that).

There is an extensive body of research that shows that a small amount of this kind of teaching and guidance can have powerful impacts on comprehension and learning from text. Students should be taught strategies for making sense of text, and this kind of teaching should count as comprehension instruction.

The Capin study found that such teaching was not uncommon, but that its quality was questionable. Too often this teaching is aimed only at the instructional text. Teachers are not guiding kids to use these strategies independently. The teaching too often fails to provide the conditional knowledge needed for students to be able to use it on their own. (Unfortunately, the arguments between knowledge and strategy advocates have drawn a line in the sand. Schools, instead of trying to ensure the quality of their strategy teaching are trying to replace it with an emphasis on information alone.)

Executive function instruction to be effective must be delivered with texts hard enough to require strategic effort. The teaching then should both help students to surmount the problems in the instructional texts and should offer counsel as to how to recognize these same barriers in the future and how to take those on independently.

6.        Questioning and answering

These observational studies spurned the questioning routines so common to classroom comprehension lessons.

That doesn’t mean teachers shouldn’t ask questions, only that the questions need to be framed differently, and they need to lead to… teaching and learning.

Monitoring student comprehension should be more purposeful than it usually is. Think of the language teaching noted above. Asking questions aimed at revealing whether students figured out the meaning of an undefined word, or of a complicated sentence, or of a subtle cohesive relationship may uncover the need for comprehension guidance.

Too many teachers and principals have supposed that asking questions like the ones on their state tests will lead to higher reading comprehension scores, and despite the research they don’t want to be convinced otherwise.

The problem with this approach is that practice with question formats doesn’t generalize. This teaching might inform me that future tests might ask main idea questions, but it doesn’t help me to figure out the main idea of a text, since there is neither a widely accepted definition of main idea, nor do authors convey their main idea in any standard manner. Such practice just can’t work.

That doesn’t mean that there are not questioning routines that can steer improved comprehension and learning. For instance, an important thing to watch for when reading stories are clues to the characters’ motivations. Students can learn to identify each character’s goals and the actions that they take to accomplish those goals. Similarly, with history text, students might learn to create timelines for the various events; in other words, paying attention to the years and dates.

The reason why these kinds of questioning routines can be useful is because they cue students to seek information that is identifiable in many texts. If the questions focus on that kind of information, then their impacts can be generalizable. Those kinds of questions tell students what we think is important. Add to this some teacher explanations about the value of seeking that kind of information and how to identify it, and you have some pretty good comprehension teaching.

I agree with the Capin study that there is more comprehension instruction than Durkin reported. But also agree with them that the quality of what is being delivered in the name of comprehension is woefully anemic.

Text and sufficient text challenge need to play much bigger roles in comprehension teaching. Such texts allow for the conveyance of richer content which increases the possibility of knowledge building. Challenging texts also increase both the importance and the possibility of learning when it comes to language acquisition and strategy learning.


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