Comprehension Skills or Strategies: Is there a difference and does it matter?

19 May, 2018
30 Comments

Blast from the Past: This blog first posted May 19. 2018 and was re-posted on February 19, 2022. These days arguments over reading comprehension tend to pose strategy teaching against developing world knowledge. Accordingly, this piece may appear to be outdated. It is nothing of the kind. A claim often made by knowledge advocates is that strategy teaching is ineffective. That isn’t the case. The claim confuses strategies with skills. Strategies help, skills not so much. Strategy proponents shouldn’t take solace in this. Though strategies can improve reading comprehension, it’s important not to overdo it – don’t spend too much time on strategy teaching. Also, no matter how much strategy teaching you provide, it’s still smart to make sure students gain lasting knowledge of their world from the texts used for reading instruction. Knowledge and strategies, together, are a powerful combination. This blog entry should help schools to emphasize comprehension strategies rather than skills.

Teacher question:

What’s the difference between comprehension skills and comprehension strategies? Are they synonyms or do we teach different things when we are teaching them?

Shanahan response:

I’m glad you asked.

Comprehension skills and comprehension strategies are very different things.

They are often confused; the terms are often used interchangeably by those who don’t understand or appreciate the distinctions they carry.

And, most importantly, these concepts energize different kinds of teaching.

The older of the two terms is “reading comprehension skills.” It was used occasionally throughout the Twentieth Century, but really took off in a big way in the 1950s. Professional development texts and basal readers were replete with the term and its use burgeoned for about 30 years before slackening a bit.

“Comprehension strategies” were rarely heard of until the 1970s. The term had wide use throughout the 1980s, both because of the extensive strategy research and because those promoting comprehension skills appropriated the newer, trendier label—old wine in new bottles. (Some of this due to honest ignorance and some to the frequent but idiotic claim of educators that any new practice is “what we were already doing.”)

Use of the term strategies finally overtook skills in 2000, but not necessarily because the practices of teachers actually had changed.

Basically, the term comprehension skills tend to refer to the abilities required to answer particular kinds of comprehension questions. Skills would include things like identifying the main idea, recognizing supporting details, drawing conclusions, inferencing, comparing and contrasting, evaluating critically, knowing vocabulary meaning, and sequencing events.

The old basal readers would make sure kids got plenty of practice with particular comprehension skills by making sure they practiced answering particular kinds of questions.

These days, the core reading programs do pretty much the same thing with the educational standards, with each standard being translated into a question type in lessons and assessments.

For most of these skills, there are no studies showing that they can be taught in a way that leads to higher comprehension, and even in those few instances where there is such evidence, the effects are quite small (and probably due to greater attention to reading the text than to practicing the so-called “skills.”)

In fact, there have been a number of studies and logical analyses showing that these skills lack any kind of psychological reality… they are indistinguishable from one another in test performance, though that hasn’t stopped instructional designers from trying to come up with programs that would teach these skills in a way that would benefit achievement (e.g., Wisconsin Design).

There has been a lot of research into question types over the past 50-60 years. Despite the claims, this body of research is a morass. There are so many variables that may be affecting any of these results, that it would be impossible to know what it all means.

Here are just a few of the variables found to affect how readers answer questions: poor/good readers; low/high knowledge readers; story/information text; the centrality of the information queried; verbatim vs. paraphrase; open-ended versus close-ended questions; reading or re-reading; text available or unavailable during answering; amount of text; factual vs. inferential; immediate recall vs. delay; and so on. (Of course, it is this complexity that undermines any possibility that one can teach question answering as a skill).

Reading has much more to do with being able to read particular kinds of texts and to deal with particular kinds of text features than to answer particular kinds of questions. The ACT (2006) concluded, for example, that if texts were easy, students could answer any kinds of question about them, while with sufficiently complex texts, they couldn’t answer any question types, no matter how simple.

An odd kind of skill the performance of which is totally dependent on the contexts in which it is used. Each text presents information in its own way, and reading comprehension is heavily bound up in the readers’ knowledge of the topic covered by the text. As such reading comprehension (different than decoding) is not a skilled activity, per se.

If comprehension is not a skill, then why has that been such a popular way to teach it? Initially, the concept fit the times. In the late 1950s when it “broke out,” B.F. Skinner’s version of behavioral psychology (e.g., stimulus-response, programmed learning) was in vogue. The idea that learning would result if we could simply induce particular responses to questions and then reward kids for their answers—rinse and repeat—seemed very convincing.

It has been harder to eradicate than a fungus, I assume, because it appears to map onto educational standards and the high-stakes tests. Principals and teachers assume it makes sense to practice the “comprehension skills” that tripped the kids up on the tests. So, they “use their data”: combing through test results to identify the kinds of questions that students failed on and then practicing those supposed skills over and over in the hopes the kids will be enabled to answer such questions on the next test. That it hasn’t actually worked doesn’t seem to dissuade them at all.

The idea of comprehension strategies is more recent, and it has a substantial body of research behind it. If the notion of comprehension skills emerged from behaviorism, then comprehension strategies is the child of cognitive psychology. Instead of repetition and automaticity as the watchwords to learning, intention and decision-making and thinking move to the forefront with strategies.

The basic premise of strategies is that readers need to actively think about the ideas in text if they are going to understand. And, since determining how to think about a text involves choices, strategies are tied up in meta-cognition (that is, thinking about thinking).

Comprehension strategies are not about coming up with answers to particular kinds of questions, but they describe actions that may help a reader to figure out and remember the information from a text.

For example, the idea of the summarization strategy is that readers should stop occasionally during reading to sum up what an author has said up to that point. Doing that throughout a reading and at the end has been found to increase recall… recall in general, not of any particular type of information.

Another frequently studied comprehension strategy is questioning. Students read, stopping throughout to quiz themselves on what the text says (and going back and rereading if one’s questions can’t be answered). The point isn’t to ask particular kinds of questions, so much as to think about the content more thoroughly, more actively than one would do if they just read from the first word to the last.

The same can be said about monitoring, visualizing, thinking about the way the text is structured or organized, rereading, and connecting the content with one’s prior knowledge.

These kinds of actions—these strategies—are used intentionally by readers to increase the chances of understanding or remembering what one has read.

Comprehension strategies need to be practiced too; however, they aren’t learned by repetition and reinforcement, but by gradual release of responsibility (including modeling, explanation, guided practice).

If you are serious about raising reading achievement, there is no point to teaching most comprehension skills. (Note: vocabulary is often listed as a comprehension skill and there are benefits to teaching that.).

On the other hand, there are very good reasons for teaching comprehension strategies, but there are at least three big problems with that kind of teaching.

First, studies of comprehension strategies have tended to be brief, usually about 6 weeks in duration (there are exceptions). Somehow that has been translated into substantial amounts of strategy teaching across students’ school lives. To be perfectly honest, no one, including me, knows how much strategy instruction is needed. But there is certainly no evidence that there are benefits to be derived from 8 to 10 years of 30-35 weeks of strategy teaching.

Second, the only point to using strategies is to make sense of texts that couldn't be grasped without that effort. Many texts are easy enough that a reader would not need to expend that amount of energy in comprehending. Unfortunately, most strategy instruction that I have seen takes place in texts that frankly are relatively easy for the kids to read. That means they have to pretend to apply those strategies in situations that wouldn’t benefit from such effort. If kids ever do apply these strategies to complex text, they are usually on their own. Most skip the effort since what such teaching conveys is that you don’t need strategies.

Finally, even major proponents of explicit comprehension strategy instruction (like the late Michael Pressley, for instance) argued that as important as it was to teach strategies, teachers needed—even when teaching them—to make sure the kids were actually learning the text content and not just the strategies they were using to think about that content. That principle largely has been ignored by teachers and publishers.

More on the teaching of comprehension skills and strategies next week; should we guide students' reading?

Comments

See what others have to say about this topic.

Sam Bommarito May 19, 2018 11:41 PM

Having lived through the transition from skills instruction to strategy instruction I found this analysis helped me to make sense of what happened. More importantly it raises the issue of how all this relates to complex text and scaffolding students in making sense out of complex text. Can't wait for the next installment!!!!

One confounding issue I'd like to see addressed- where do relatively easy to decode complex texts fit in to all this? Take a math textbook explaining complex formulas. Taken by themselves some individual sentences in some explainations would test at a relatively low decodability levels. I know some decodability formulas take this into account to some degree, but others do not. Overall I'm sensing there is more to complex text than most decodability formulas are able to measure. Thoughts about this???? Thanks. Sam

Timothy Shanahan May 20, 2018 03:26 AM

Sam— readability measures like Lexie’s predict difficulty levels, but they don’t measure them... essentially they say that texts that have rarer vocabulary and longer sentences tend to be more difficult than ones that don’t and they place texts on that kind of continuum. There are many other factors that matter in what makes text complex than those two variables. Those methods are useful for identifying which texts your kids are likely to struggle with (not perfect, but acceptable). Once you have such texts then you need to scaffold text elements and content features to support the student in making sense of the text (including text structure, syntax, cohesion, vocabulary, tone, decidability, literary devices, graphic elements, etc.).

Thanks

Kevin Kuehn May 20, 2018 12:09 PM

Hey Tim,

I really appreciate this distinction. In particular, I can definitely see how the “skills” that are taught are often simply rephrased standards. Something has always felt off about that. I could be way off, but it seems as though there is a misconception that because standards reference outcomes or things that effective readers should be able to do, they can be taught, as you mentioned, by repeatedly asking the same types of questions or as I’ve often seen, by teaching a “three-step process” for finding the main idea. It’s one of the things that has rubbed me the wrong way about the Teacher’s College approach to reading instruction. I’ve tried to jump down the proverbial rabbit hole of comprehension strategies (mainly through Mosaic of Thought for reading strategies and Harvard's Project Zero for thinking strategies and more specifically, building/activating prior knowledge), but I’m not sure I’m entirely on the right track.

You alluded to comprehension strategies not being enough. Could you point me to other resources that you think would help develop a well-rounded reading program? If this is going to be addressed in a future post, no worries.

Thanks!

Elisa Sansone May 20, 2018 01:39 PM

My third grader are completing a two month research based reading and writing unit on feature articles. The texts available for research in reading and writing included a variety of great web sites for kids. Students chose people of personal interest. They were encouraged to find a specific focus or angle on the person to research. For example: " where is Einstein's brain and why is it there?"
The web sites for kids were of varying reading levels, some far higher than my third graders. In spite of this, I found students comprehended with few strategies or skills articulated and taught in isolation.
The one comprehension strategy I did teach repeatedly was the use article features such as titles, sub-titles, section titles, photo and photo captions. Acquisition of the skills used to comprehend was assessed through the content and the use of format in their completed written feature articles.

My point: In spite of complex texts with minimal attention to isolating strategies or skills in their research, students were able to demonstrate comprehension in the gathering of facts and the ensuing development of opinions that were then written about in the format of a TimeForKids - used as a writing mentor text. They were encouraged to understand "as much as they could", take notes, and then complete feature articles.
I believe their success in reading comprehension of complex texts was the choice of high interest topics, and a driving desire to share work with others. The published pieces were completed on google.docs which provided big inspiration.

Natalie Wexler May 20, 2018 04:32 PM

Thanks for this! But I still have a couple of questions about whether skills and strategies are really that different, and I'd love to hear your thoughts.

First, you seem to be saying that reading comprehension skills aren't really skills because whether or not they "work" is highly dependent on the complexity of the particular text (agreed, and, I would add, also on the reader's relevant background knowledge). But you also seem to be saying that strategies are different because they are generally applicable--e.g., you mention summarizing boosts "recall in general, not of any particular type of information."

That may be true, but you have to be able to understand the text first, at least at some level, before you can apply the strategy of summarizing, just as with a skill like "main idea." So--as with skills--if the text is more complex, won't the usefulness of a strategy vary with the complexity of the text? And therefore also depend on context?

Second: You say that strategies, as distinct from skills, are used intentionally by readers. My understanding, though, is that the strategies were originally derived from things that expert readers were found to do when their comprehension breaks down. That doesn't mean they're doing them intentionally, though. They may ask themselves questions when they reach the end of a paragraph they don't understand, but they're not thinking, "Hmm, I think I'm going to use the strategy of asking questions." They just do it (judging from my own experience, at least).

Inexpert readers might have to apply strategies consciously at first, but isn't the ultimate goal to have them do it UNconsciously, as expert readers do? It seems to me that constantly stepping back and thinking about what strategy to use--rather than just using one automatically--makes comprehension MORE difficult, because it's another thing to juggle in working memory. So isn't the ultimate goal with strategies to have readers start using them unconsciously--just as with skills?

Thanks for any guidance you can provide!

Natalie Wexler May 20, 2018 04:33 PM

Timothy Shanahan Jan 09, 2022 11:53 PM

Pete--
A skill is only a skill if it can be repeated again and again in largely the same way. When I am asked to add 2+2 that is a skill, because no matter how you ask the question, 2+2 is going to come out to the same answer. The same is true for decoding skills. The letter P will usually be associated with the /p/ sound, though there are exceptions (for instance if the p is followed by an h, then it is associated with another phoneme). In other words, skills may be simple or they may be a bit complex (such as having conditional rules as with the letter P), but they are highly repeatable.
How do you determine the main idea of a text? That is not a repeatable skill which is why when adults are asked to provide main ideas of texts they come up with such widely differing answers. We say things like, "it is what the text is all about" but that information doesn't lead to some set of repeatable steps that would allow someone to identify main ideas for a range of texts (across genres, contents, degree of match with reader's prior knowledge, vocabulary difficulty, sentence complexity, etc.). That means that students may be able to cobble together a main idea that you agree with for a particular text, but if they did the same thing with another text, you wouldn't be happy with their result. It's that non-repeatability that makes such instruction a waste of time. Thus, having students practicing answering particular types of questions with various texts is a weak way to teach reading comprehension (though we see more and more of that kind of thing -- having kids read passages similar in length to what they will be asked to read on their state reading test and then answering the kinds of questions that will be asked -- with the idea that they'll become more skilled at it and that proficiency will translate to better performance when they take the state test.
You, however, are interpreting my antipathy for such non-teaching as meaning that there shouldn't be text discussions, writing about text, synthesis projects with multiple texts, analysis of the information in texts and so on. Nothing could be further from the truth. Kids should be engaged in all of those kinds of activities -- and instruction should be guiding them to do things that are transferable from text to text (like learning vocabulary, learning how to break down sentences to figure out what they mean, working with text structure and cohesion, etc.).
Good luck.

tim

Deborah Parkhill Mullis Feb 20, 2022 05:02 PM

I once had a 6th-grader tell me that he would always hate reading. "Okay," I said. Then I asked, "What do you like?" Without missing a beat, he replied, "Horses." We started working through the O-G sequence according to what he needed to review/didn't know. We also started reading an abridged "movie version" of Black Beauty that he owned. He knew this book very well but I wanted to hear him read it. Next, we perused other novels about horses at the public library where I tutored and picked one that was little more difficult. We read between 15 and 20 minutes at the top of his twice-a week lessons. I modeled reading a page as he followed along. He read a page as I followed along. We traded every other page. I jotted down notes as inconspicuously as possible to address with a game or within a lesson plan later. We discussed each chapter as we finished it. He was writing seven sentences that I dictated to him after completing an O-G lesson before I began the next one in order to apply his skills. When we finished a book, he would apply those skills to writing a paragraph or two about that book. Within a year, he was reading an adult "horse" novel based on a true story that was set in North Carolina where I live. As we went through all these books and O-G lesson plans, he built the skills necessary to read with fluency, comprehend and write with fluency. If my student hesitated on a word like "chortle" I only had to do was say r-controlled first syllable and sometimes consonant -le second syllable but usually he had it after I gave a clue about the first syllable. We would discuss the meaning of chortle or any other unfamiliar word. Because I had focused on horse novels, I gave this student a non-fiction book about horses for his birthday which was exactly one year after I started working with him. It took me a long time to choose the right book. One that didn't contain too much information that he already knew about horses. We didn't have our O-G lesson that day because he could not stop reading the book. Mission accomplished. I use this strategy often with older students. I once had a high school student that loved playing WW II and playing video games related to WW II. Rather than let that hobby go to waste, we read, "Night" and then "Prisoner B-3087" and finally "The Book Thief." I believe children learn comprehension skills/strategies by reading books that interest them. Those skills do transfer to other areas of study but honestly all of us fail to comprehend what we find boring. That's just human nature.