My Take on the Recent Hechinger Report about Comprehension: It still takes more than building background knowledge and vocabulary to improve comprehension. Comprehension strategies can and should be directly taught in a way that assures students can internalize and use them.
If you haven’t seen the new Hechinger Report about comprehension, here is a LINK and a brief excerpt:
A landmark study relatively good evidence paper published in a 2025 issue
Here is the results and conclusions section of the 2025 article Reading Comprehension Instruction: Evaluating Our Progress Since Durkin’s Seminal Study by Philip Capan et al.
As a reminder, Durkin’s landmark study found that in 1979 less than 1 percent of classroom time was spent on TEACHING comprehension. Over 4 decades later, Capan et al.’s new study reports that time spent on TEACHING comprehension is still woefully inadequate. Time spent on comprehension, more often than not, comes in the form of simple comprehension checks, not in the form of teaching comprehension. Things like improving knowledge of text structures or teaching reading comprehension strategies continue to be ignored in 2025, just as they were in 1979. I’ve written before about how and why this has happened- LINK.
I think part of the reason this is happening is because of the misinterpretation of what research by Willingham and others shows about how comprehension should be taught, specifically how much time needs to be spent on teaching comprehension strategies. Even staunch SoR advocates like Tim Shanahan called Willingham’s conclusions about significantly reducing the amount of time spent teaching comprehension strategies to be faulty LINK.
For more information on Shanahan’s views, please see his March 10 2025 post. LINK
In my blog about this topic, I also point out that research by folks like Nell Duke indicates that teaching comprehension strategies should be an important part of any literacy program.
I talk about Duke’s idea that reading is much more than decoding words- LINK. I also talk about her idea that it is clear that “if we explicitly teach and then give students lots of opportunity to practice specific comprehension strategies, their reading comprehension will improve….” This even includes students in the very early years of schooling LINK. I also discussed what Duke had to say at the What Research Says about Reading Instruction session at the 2019 ILA convention. She said, “It’s as though because we think content knowledge building is so important, we’re just going to ignore three decades of research on comprehensive strategy instruction,” said Duke. “This isn’t a zero-sum game saying, ‘if you can’t attend to content, then you can’t teach comprehension strategies’ or ‘if you teach comprehension strategies, you must not be paying enough attention to vocabulary or morphology.” LINK
Please do not interpret what I’ve just presented as meaning that teaching vocabulary and background are unimportant. Rather, I’m saying that teaching vocabulary and background is necessary but not sufficient.
When In-servicing teachers on how to teach comprehension strategies, here is what I have to say:
I am saying that the first step is teaching the strategy. Then, ask the students to use the strategy when they are reading. Finally, after several weeks of using the strategy AS NEEDED, report back to the class about what they did and how the strategy helped them. By the way, NRP indicated that teaching more than one strategy at a time is effective. So these discussions can and should include information about more than just one strategy.
Instructional time is a zero-sum game. So, how we spend our instructional time matters. When I asked Shanahan about recent studies on how teachers actually spend their time, he indicated that there was not much current information. Without that information, we are flying without instruments. I have listened extensively to folks from all sides of the great debate in reading. When talking to teachers who say they are following SoR, I hear much evidence of time spent on decoding, with little or no evidence that they are directly teaching reading strategies. At best, their comprehension work falls into the category of “checking comprehension” and building background and vocabulary. In addition, many of the most popular decoding programs require so much class time that there is a real danger that if you follow all the prescribed lessons, there won’t be time for anything else. Perhaps the recent drops in NAEP scores can be partly tied to the failure to teach comprehension strategies directly. That means teaching them in a way that guarantees students internalize and use them. As Leah Mermelstien and others have said, we need to learn how to teach things so they stick. We need new observational studies along the lines of those done by Durkin.
Here is a final thought about why it is important that reading instruction needs to include a wide range of activities. Tim Rasinski shared this chart as part of his LitCon2025 keynote address:
Notice the effect sizes of the various components of reading. Word recognition does have a significant effect size. However, so do Active Self-Regulation, the various Bridging Processes et. al. Spending too much instructional time on one (in this case, word recognition) means that others are ignored. We should be looking at the reading curriculum through all these lenses, not just the lens of word recognition. Most importantly, we must act on something we’ve known for decades. Comprehension/comprehension strategies can and should be directly taught in a way that assures students can internalize and use them. Dare to dream.
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