We've Had Reading Comprehension All Wrong
In this video, Dr. Justin Baeder discusses how the field has misunderstood reading comprehension, focusing on skills and strategies when background knowledge is the key factor.
Key Takeaways
- Comprehension depends on knowledge - Understanding a text requires knowing about the topic, not just applying generic reading strategies
- Strategy instruction has been overemphasized - Teaching strategies like 'find the main idea' does far less for comprehension than building knowledge
- This changes everything about literacy instruction - Schools should focus on building knowledge through content-rich curricula rather than practicing reading strategies in isolation
Transcript
We've had reading comprehension all wrong for years now, and only in the last couple of years have we really become clear on what goes into reading comprehension.
And the answer is knowledge.
Students need background knowledge.
They need knowledge of vocabulary.
They need to understand the topic that they're reading about in order to comprehend what they're reading.
And that's a big contrast to the way we've approached reading over the last two decades, especially since No Child Left Behind.
when we thought we should be teaching skills and strategies.
And a lot of the recent research, you can read about this in Dan Willingham's work and in Natalie Wexler's book, The Knowledge Gap, a lot of the recent research has found that those skills are not really skills, and the strategies that we've been teaching to help build those skills don't actually work.
At the end of the day, you can use all the strategies in the world, and if you don't have the background knowledge to understand what you're reading, you're not going to understand what you're reading.
There are no general reading comprehension strategies that work without background knowledge.
So Natalie Wexler has been doing a great job of reporting on this new science of reading.
And of course, there's a lot about the science of reading around phonics and especially with early phonics instruction and the importance of that, but we're now realizing just how important background knowledge is as well.
And if we want to help all students learn to be successful readers and to have a good comprehension and ultimately to do well on tests, but more importantly, to do well in life, we have to systematically build background knowledge.
So Natalie has a new podcast called the knowledge matters podcast it's from the knowledge matters campaign and she'll tell you all about how we got to this point how we made some of the mistakes in reading instruction where we thought it was all about skills and strategies and now how we're correcting course and figuring out that background knowledge really plays a crucial role so check that out at the knowledge matters campaign or wherever you get podcasts and let me know what you think