How Far Have We Come in Supporting Children’s Reading Comprehension?

A new paper finds “substantial gap persists” between reading comprehension research and practice, calls for greater efforts to prioritize effective instruction methods

Back in the late 1970s, literacy researcher Dolores Durkin carried out a small but influential study on reading comprehension instruction in the United States. What she discovered, through her observations of English language arts and social studies classes for children in third through sixth grade, surprised her. Teachers hardly taught reading comprehension at all — less than 1% of instructional time was devoted to it. Durkin defined comprehension instruction as when a teacher did or said something to help students grasp the meaning of what they were reading. However, what she observed was mostly comprehension assessment or testing where, after reading a text, a teacher would typically ask the entire class questions related to a few facts about the book.

A recently published study in the academic journal Scientific Studies of Reading, led by Phil Capin, an assistant professor at Harvard Graduate School of Education, assesses how much progress has been made in teaching students reading comprehension skills since Durkin’s study. The paper notes that significant knowledge has been acquired in recent decades about how to develop children’s reading for understanding, but the researchers behind the new study wanted to understand how much that knowledge, including recommended research-based practices, is made use of in K–12 schools.

Among the findings:

Capin and his team reviewed 66 existing observational studies of reading comprehension instruction in K–12 schools, between 1980 and 2023, and found:

• Instruction time has increased since Durkin’s days, but it is still low. On average only 23% of instructional time was devoted to comprehension during reading/language arts, even though research shows that developing reading comprehension skills across grades should be a priority.
• Students had limited time and opportunities to engage with texts and that reduced time “spent on text reading and the length of texts read may be potential barriers to the frequency of reading comprehension instruction.”
• Reading comprehension strategies were not well supported by teachers. When there were conversations about texts in classrooms, they were much like the interactions observed by Durkin: “teacher-led and teacher-dominated,” said Capin.

Among the conclusions:

• The researchers found that, “a substantial gap persists between the reading comprehension practices identified as research-based and those observed in typical practice,” and they call for “renewed efforts to prioritize reading comprehension instruction in policy and practice.”

What are the most effective reading comprehension instruction practices?

Recommendations from the study flagged by Capin include:  

1. Developing word meaning knowledge. The paper highlights “explicit vocabulary instruction that provides repeated exposure to new words in varied contexts,” as well as “multiple opportunities to practice using new vocabulary while reading, writing and speaking.”
2. Developing background and general knowledge. Capin pointed to the work of HGSE colleagues in this area including a social studies curriculum that supports students’ reading comprehension by Professor Catherine Snow, and the Model of Reading Engagement program, developed by Professor James Kim’s READS Lab, which assists children with developing a mental framework to gain, organize and apply knowledge.

Continue reading at www.gse.harvard.edu