There are a lot of things that have improved over the past 50 years, but are still far from perfect: Car safety. Solar power uptake. Scores of medical procedures.
Add reading comprehension instruction to the list.
A new review paper from researchers across six different universities finds that English/language arts teachers across grades K-12 aren’t regularly using what research shows to be the most effective strategies for helping students understand text. But the more recent studies in the analysis suggest that might be changing.
And while reading teachers spend less than a quarter of the class time devoted to reading working on comprehension, that’s still magnitudes more than the less than 1 percent of time research shows they spent in the 1970s.
“Yes, it’s discouraging,” said Phil Capin, an assistant professor of education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and the lead author on the study. “But we do have some reasons to think that the amount of time, and the use of evidence-based practices, are increasing.”
Capin and his colleagues set out to understand how much the state of reading comprehension instruction has changed since the late 1970s, when reading researcher Dolores Durkin conducted a large-scale observational study of ELA and social studies instruction in grades 3-6. Durkin found that teachers spent almost no time teaching students how to make sense of the content they were reading.
In the decades since, researchers have published dozens of studies and educator-focused practice guides aimed at helping teachers use proven methods. But as Capin and his colleagues have found, much of this work hasn’t translated to the classroom.
This disconnect may seem familiar to those who have followed the “science of reading” movement—an attempt to align instruction in foundational reading skills, such as phonics, to what evidence shows are the methods most likely to help students crack the code of written language.
“We really focused on making sure that we fixed that. We need to do the same now and turn attention to [comprehension instruction],” said Kelly Cartwright, a professor of early child literacy at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte’s Cato College of Education, who was not involved with the study. “You can’t think of reading as just one thing.
“I’m encouraged that research-based practices, and just comprehension instruction in general, seem to be increasing,” Cartwright continued. “But I think the overall takeaway is that things haven’t changed a lot since Durkin’s study, given how much time and how many resources have been put into reading instruction. … The Capin study shows us that we have more to do. It’s a call to action.”
Uneven use of evidence-based practices, spotty implementation
Capin and his colleagues examined 66 studies published between 1980 and 2023 that documented the amount, type, and/or quality of reading comprehension occurring in schools. The set included qualitative, quantitative, and mixed-methods studies.
Researchers looked for evidence that teachers were using comprehension instruction approaches featured in the Institute of Education Sciences’ What Works Clearinghouse guides, a set of research-based recommendations for teachers that include activities such as extended discussion of text and teaching students about how different types of texts are structured. They found some evidence of these practices, but also “considerable” time spent focused on low-level comprehension questions.
Teachers ask questions about discrete facts in the passage, students give their answers, and then teachers tell students whether they were correct or not. Teachers often didn’t extend students’ thinking, or prompt them to elaborate on their ideas.
“We’re not rejecting the value of asking low-level questions” focused on factual recall, said Capin. “We’re saying reading comprehension instruction shouldn’t end there.”
A little over half of the studies showed teachers developing students’ background knowledge related to text as part of their comprehension instruction, while half also showed the use of reading comprehension strategy instruction. Both are evidence-based practices.
But strategy instruction wasn’t always implemented well. Often, studies observing teachers’ lessons found that teachers simply mentioned a strategy, rather than explaining how to use it and why—the difference, for instance, between telling students to annotate a text vs. modeling how to do it and offering examples.
Further complicating the results, the different studies in the review highlighted evidence of different practices—not every study noted whether each approach was present.
For example, about half of all studies didn’t report whether teachers worked with students to develop word meaning. They might have, but there’s no way to determine from the results.
“Despite our best efforts, I’m still not sure we have a clear understanding of what typical reading comprehension instruction looks like,” Capin said.
One general trend emerges, though: Teachers in later studies—those conducted after 2000—were more likely to use research-based practices.
That moment in time marked a “shift in the field toward an evidence-based model of education,” said Cartwright. The National Reading Panel, a group convened at the request of Congress to catalog the evidence behind different approaches to reading instruction, published its report in 2000. Reading First, a federal initiative that required schools to use methods aligned with scientifically based reading research, launched in 2002.
Across all of the studies in Capin and his colleagues’ analysis, teachers spent 23 percent of class time on average teaching reading comprehension across grades K-12. That number alone doesn’t mean much, said Capin, as averages varied across the grade levels. More “meaningful,” he said, is the finding across several studies that students didn’t actually spend that much time reading—between 10-15 percent of class time, in some cases.
“The obvious issue is that it is quite difficult to teach reading comprehension when teachers do not ask students to read text,” the authors write.
Knowledge or strategies? The debate over reading comprehension continues
In the paper, the researchers call for more focus on evidence-based reading comprehension—potentially through legislative avenues, similar to recently passed state laws around teaching evidence-based foundational skills instruction.
But realizing that solution could be easier said than done, as debates have begun to surface in the field about the best way to teach reading comprehension.
Comprehension strategy instruction has a solid research base. Teacher guides on evidence-based practices from the What Works Clearinghouse recommend teaching students across grade levels how to use these strategies—steps such as monitoring their own understanding as they read, or visualizing what’s happening in a story.
Over the past decade, though, another approach has gained traction: using curricula that explicitly builds children’s knowledge about the world through social studies and science content, in attempts to help them unlock more meaning from the texts they’re reading. Research shows that students with more world knowledge understand texts better, though there’s less evidence for the effectiveness of specific curricula.
Some experts in the field say schools shouldn’t take an either-or approach.
“We think about education or life in false dichotomies, because it’s easy to simplify thinking in that way. But it’s not a knowledge-or-strategies situation,” said Cartwright. “Children cannot comprehend text if they don’t have the background knowledge from which to make meaning … but knowing what to do with your knowledge, and with a text to recruit that knowledge to help you comprehend, is also essential.”
Good strategy instruction shows kids how to do that, Cartwright said—for example, when a teacher models how to marshall evidence from an article to make an argument about its main idea, rather than just telling students to find the main idea.
The latter is the equivalent of telling students they’re going to practice swimming and then simply throwing them into a pool with no further instruction, she said.
“That’s how children drown, and that’s how they don’t learn to comprehend,” she said.
