Knowledge or Comprehension Strategies -- What Should We Teach?

22 July, 2023
15 Comments

Teacher question:

Are we supposed to teach reading strategies or not? I keep coming across contradictory information. Some writers say the research supports strategy teaching and some say that we should teach background information instead. I respect your opinion. What do you think?

RELATED: Can we really teach prosody and why would we want to?

Shanahan response:

Many studies – hundreds actually – have shown that teaching comprehension strategies can improve reading comprehension (Filderman, Austin, Boucher, O’Donnell, & Swanson, 2022; National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, 2000). That’s a pretty strong argument for teaching strategies.

That’s why I’ve taught them to students myself.

That’s why I sometimes use them when I’m reading.

The first question to ask ourselves, it seems to me, is why do strategies help? How do they make someone a better reader?

I remember Dick Venezky telling me that one of the big benefits of phonics instruction was that it got kids to look at the words, to look at all the letters in the words. At the time, I thought that was glib. But over time, I’ve come to appreciate the wisdom in that explanation.

My answer for why and how strategies work is as glib as that.

Strategies do two things for readers.

First, they require readers to think about a text more than they would if they just read it.

If readers think more about the ideas in a text, they are more likely to remember them later. Strategies slow you down. It takes more time to read a text and implement a strategy than to only read the text.

Too many readers are satisfied with comprehending a text. They may understand it as they read, but they don’t retain the information. We use the term “reading comprehension” too generally. When we use it, we usually intend more than just understanding.

No, it often includes the idea that readers should remember what they read so that they can successfully answer questions, participate in discussions, or use the information in some other way.

Strategies arm readers with purposeful actions they can take before, during, and after reading. Basically, they get readers to think about the ideas more than once. They facilitate learning from text. (That’s why Ron Carver used to argue that the term comprehension strategies was a misnomer; he thought a more apt label was study skills, skills one would use to study a text or learn from it.)

The idea of strategies is to provide readers with the tools that will allow them to accomplish purposeful learning – and the tools work by slowing us down and getting us to think more than once about the ideas in the text. A rather blunt tool admittedly, but, according to the empirical studies, an effective one.

As such, strategies play a very different role in the reading process than knowledge.

It should not be a choice between the two.

Second, strategies may also play a useful role in guiding student attention to key information in a text. (I tend to think of most strategies as “paying attention strategies.”)

When I’m reading something that is very hard for me, I write down the most important idea from each paragraph or section. That ensures that I pay attention to all the key ideas, without the details distracting me.

Other strategies encourage readers to depend on the author’s organizational scheme. Doing so focuses attention on certain key information that they may neglect without that strategy.

Further distinguishing knowledge and strategies in reading are those strategies that emphasize making connections between the text and the knowledge that we bring to the text.

Prediction, for instance, is a strategy that leads readers to anticipate what the author will reveal. Predictions require that readers combine information from the text with the knowledge they bring to the text. Predicting is a tool readers can apply in certain reading situations, but it can only work if there is relevant knowledge available.

Inferencing is another such strategy. Readers can be sensitized to the concept that texts won’t provide explicitly all the needed information so readers must draw inferences to fill in the blanks and make connections. But the inferencing strategy only works to the extent that there is background knowledge available from which to generate those inferences.

A third strategy that depends on knowledge and encourages readers to connect knowledge to text is comprehension monitoring. With this one, students are taught to pay attention to whether they are understanding a text or if it is making sense. Determining whether something makes sense means that you can compare it with some standard and that standard for this is the knowledge that you bring to the text.

In all these examples, the strategy gives the reader some insights about text (e.g., it has a structure, the text should make sense, text sometimes implies rather than states information) and some action steps that if taken will improve understanding and memory for what is read.

But none of these strategies pays off unless the reader possesses sufficient topical knowledge to make them work.

As such strategies are useful and knowledge is essential.

That sounds like reading lessons would be better off emphasizing the learning of content, rather than developing insights about text and reading and developing actions students can use in a purposeful way to think more about the text.

But that is not necessarily the case. Our emphasis on knowledge should not be the central goal of reading instruction. It should be the central goal of schooling. Yes, kids should read texts worth knowing in their reading lessons and they should be held accountable for the content learning that can be gained from such texts. But learning also needs to come from social studies, science, and the arts, as well as from all the other sources of information that children confront in the media, in their play activities and social interactions, and so on.

Reading strategies are something students are likely to learn only in a reading lesson. As such, they deserve special attention in those lessons.

I don’t accept the premise of what you are hearing – that reading lessons should either teach strategies or knowledge. They need to accomplish the former and contribute to the latter.

Although I didn’t cite many specific studies in this blog entry, it heavily benefited from the brilliant contributions of the late Ernst Z. Rothkopf, whose pioneering work on “mathemagenic activities” presaged all the strategy research in reading.

READ MORE: Shanahan On Literacy Blog

References

Filderman, M. J., Austin, C. R., Boucher, A. N., O’Donnell, K., & Swanson, E. A. (2022). A meta-analysis of the effects of reading comprehension interventions on the reading comprehension outcomes of struggling readers in third through 12^th grades. Exceptional Children, 88(2), 163-184. doi.org/10.1177/00144029211050860

National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, NIH, DHHS. (2000). Report of the National Reading Panel: Teaching Children to Read: Reports of the Subgroups (00-4754). Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.

Rothkopf, E. Z. (1970). The concept of mathemagenic activities. Review of Educational Research, 40(3), 325-336.

Rothkopf, E. Z. (2008). Reflections on the field: Aspirations of learning science and the practical logic of instructional enterprises. Educational Psychology Review, 20(3), 351-368. doi.org/10.1007/s10648-008-9076-5

Comments

See what others have to say about this topic.

Rob Jul 22, 2023 01:12 PM

The problem is most adults and kids forget the content they learn from books over time unless they revisit the material.

Gwen Pauloski Jul 22, 2023 01:18 PM

Dr. Shanahan, thank you so much for this post. I am writing a book for middle-grades teachers who want to help students deepen their info-text comprehension. I’m a veteran middle grades teacher, and did my dissertation research on these practices in my classroom.

The book centers on explicitly teaching the strategies needed to make sense of complex info-texts then providing scaffolded practice through shared study of interesting complex texts. This seems so countercultural now yet ironically these practices are supported by decades of research. I would love to cite this work with your permission.

Also, if you know of someone who might be interested in serving as a beta reader, I’m at the point where I’m starting to send out chapters for feedback.

Thank you sincerely for your dedication and ongoing contribution to this field.

Gwen Pauloski

Jo Anne Gross Jul 22, 2023 01:39 PM

I’m appreciative of this piece and will refer it to everyone I train and have trained.
Thank You Dr.Shanahan

You may not be fully aware of how much this clarifies for the Knowledge Gap competitors that are confusing the issues.

Timothy Shanahan Jul 22, 2023 02:53 PM

Gwen--

Feel free to use this entry. Unfortunately, I couldn't be helpful on the other matter.

tim

Joan Sedita Jul 22, 2023 05:20 PM

Once again, thank you Tim for reminding everyone that there is a large body of research indicating that teaching comprehension strategies improves reading comprehension. I especially like the point you make that teaching students strategies gives them tools to be active as they read, resulting in longer term memory of what they are comprehending. I like your line "I write down the most important idea from each paragraph or section. That ensures that I pay attention to all the key ideas, without the details distracting me." This is what teaching main idea is all about. The ability to identify and state the main ideas from text is key to taking notes, but also to being able to summarize, which research identifies as one of the most beneficial reading comprehension strategies. (And summarizing also turns out to be a highly effective strategy for improving writing ability).

Just because we know that having background knowledge about the topic in text being read will make it easier to comprehend the text, this does not mean we should stop teaching and providing guided practice for comprehension strategies and replacing that time with building more generic knowledge. There are some rather vocal proponents in the field who suggest just that and knock strategy instruction, and in particular main idea instruction. This is probably why the teacher who contacted you says she/he heard contradictory information. So your point "it should not be a choice between the two" is important.

There are "before" reading comprehension strategies that can help provide some background knowledge when students do not have any. For example, previewing unfamiliar vocabulary that includes having students make connections to word they already know about the topic. Another example is giving students a top-down topic web of the major topics covered in the text and having collaborative discussions where students talk about what they already know about the topics, posing questions about the topics, or making predictions about what they think they will learn. This builds background knowledge.

Finally, I'd like to suggest that your comment "as such strategies are useful and knowledge is essential" could also be turned around to say "as such strategies are essential and knowledge is useful." I say this because it is not possible to teach students about every topic they will encounter in text -- there will always be text we read for which we do not have prior knowledge. But students can be provided with some background knowledge (as described before) and then use their comprehension strategies to learn from the text. On the other hand, if a students have background knowledge about something they are reading, but they have minimal or no comprehensions strategies, their comprehension will be impaired.