Dive Brief:
- The traditional approach to teaching reading comprehension in elementary schools may not be fully helping young readers learn the essential themes of a text. Rather, students need broader cross-disciplinary knowledge to better understand what they are reading, according to a new brief by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute.
- Typically, once young students have learned to decode words, reading comprehension is taught through generalized skills like story mapping and question asking. But overemphasizing instruction in comprehension skills can be counterproductive, the brief said.
- To maximize instruction in reading comprehension, Fordham recommends schools expose students to knowledge-rich curricula, and that teacher preparation programs should emphasize the importance of knowledge building.
Dive Insight:
The Fordham report, released Wednesday, includes a review of studies on reading comprehension in schools dating back to the 1970s. It was written by Daniel Buck, an editorial and policy associate at the education reform research and analysis organization.
One paper, known as the "Baseball Study" and printed in the Journal of Educational Psychology in 1988, found that a junior high schooler's knowledge of baseball — not their reading ability — predicted their comprehension and recall of a story they read about a half-inning of a baseball game. Both struggling readers and good readers with high knowledge of the game performed equally, as did both sets of readers who had little knowledge of baseball.
Fordham notes that since the Baseball Study came out, other studies have confirmed that topical knowledge has a "huge effect" on a reader's ability to comprehend a text.
Students do benefit from some reading comprehension skill-based instruction, the report said. However, those skills are strengthened by access to carefully sequenced and paced, teacher-directed instruction across multiple subjects, including social studies, science and literature.
The content students learn from books can be more important than a book's level of difficulty, the report said. To be sure, connecting textual difficulty to a student’s competency makes sense, as high schoolers would not read Dr. Seuss books and early elementary students would not be assigned Chaucer’s "Canterbury Tales."
But having a coherent instructional sequence that exposes students to a variety of genres and related topics can matter more for reading comprehension. "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,'” the report said.
As states ramp up science of reading instructional practices, education leaders should also consider approving knowledge-rich curricula, adding essential content in state standards in a coordinated way across multiple subjects, and providing a list of specific texts from which teachers or districts can choose for particular grade levels, Fordham recommends.
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