Science of Reading: The Podcast

Summer ‘25 Rewind: The missing link in reading comprehension, with Anne Lucas

• Amplify Education

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In this rewind episode of Science of Reading: The Podcast, we revisit a Season 1 conversation between host Susan Lambert and Anne Lucas, former curriculum director and current Associate Vice President of Product, Literacy Suite Initiatives & Supplementals at Amplify  on the complexities of reading comprehension.Together they dive into the complex nature of comprehension and why it’s so difficult to teach. 

Show notes:

Quotes:

“We often think about comprehension as a product, or something that happens after kids read, but … the ability for a student to build a model or a network of ideas or a picture in their mind happens while they're reading.” —Anne Lucas

“You know, you don't have to completely change your curriculum; you don't have to completely change the way you're teaching.” —Anne Lucas

“Comprehension is making sense and meaning while you read, so you have the ability to discuss, analyze, and form an opinion about something after you read it.” —Anne Lucas

Episode timestamps*
03:00 Introduction: Who is Anne Lucas?
07:00 Defining comprehension
09:00 The missing link in comprehension
10:00 Comprehension micro skills vs decoding
14:00 End goal vs. process
16:00 Current research
18:00 Significance of “small” words
20:00 Targeting micro skills in the classroom
22:00 Comprehension skills vs strategies
27:00 Teacher response to learning about micro skills
29:00 Background knowledge
31:00 Final takeaways on comprehension
*Timestamps are approximate, rounded to nearest minute

[00:00:00] Anne Lucas: The process of reading comprehension is very multifaceted and encompasses a lot of different skills beyond what we think of typically.

[00:00:15] Susan Lambert: This is Susan Lambert and welcome to Science of Reading: The Podcast from Amplify. As we come up on the July 4 holiday, and as this show nears an amazing 7 million downloads, I'm using this opportunity to draw some connections between the past and future of the podcast. First, let me talk about the future.

[00:00:38] Susan Lambert: In just two weeks, we're releasing our second-ever Science of Reading Essentials episode. These shorter episodes are specially designed to pull together the essential information on a single literacy topic so that you'll come away with both a grounding in the research and strategies to help your students in the classroom.

[00:01:01] Susan Lambert: After delving into writing on our first essentials episode, in two weeks, we're putting the spotlight on comprehension. Comprehension is our ultimate goal with readers. And it's such a vast topic. So that's the focus of our next Science of Reading Essentials episode coming in just two weeks. Then on July 22, 2025, I'll be hosting a summer learning series webinar that's all about comprehension.

[00:01:30] Susan Lambert: I hope you'll join me for this hour of free professional development, reflecting on the research and insights of Dr. Hugh Catts and Dr. Jane Oakhill. Find out more information and register for free at amplify.com/sorsummerlearning. We'll also have a link in the show notes. So to help us get ready for all of that, I went deep into the archives to pull out one of my all-time favorite episodes on comprehension.

[00:02:01] Susan Lambert: It features Anne Lucas. She's a former curriculum director and current associate vice president, product, literacy suite initiatives and supplementals at Amplify. She joined us back on Season 1 to delve into the robust research around comprehension and to unpack comprehension micro skills. Let's listen in.

[00:02:26] Susan Lambert: Hello, Anne. Thank you so much for joining us today. 

[00:02:30] Anne Lucas: Of course. Thank you for having me, Susan. 

[00:02:33] Susan Lambert: You know, we always like to start these episodes by just asking people about their backgrounds and what was your journey that actually led you to the place that you're at? And we're actually gonna be talking about comprehension today, which was super exciting.

[00:02:47] Susan Lambert: But how did you get here? 

[00:02:50] Anne Lucas: Yeah. One of my favorite topics . So I started my career working in schools as a teacher, I was an academic dean for grades K-2 and a curriculum director for grades K-4. And in each of those roles, without fail, the thing that was always hardest for me and for the teachers that I was working with was reading comprehension.

[00:03:14] Anne Lucas: And, in particular, like what I always found to be really challenging about it was it was so hard to figure out why students were confused or like what was the one thing that I could alter in my instruction to help them. And the scenario that's so familiar to me is sitting down to read with a student, listening to them read beautifully, perfect decoding, perfect fluency. And then I ask them something after they read, like what's the problem in the story or what's the main idea of what you just read? And they say something just like completely wonky off the wall and you know, you're just kind of left sitting there like, wait, did we just read the same book? What just happened?

[00:03:57] Anne Lucas: And so it just made me realize how comprehension is so multifaceted and there are so many pieces to the puzzle, and it was just always something I wanted to learn more about so I could get better at teaching it and help others get better at teaching it as well. 

[00:04:12] Susan Lambert: Yeah. That's great. And so what you're doing right now actually is, you're working for Amplify and you're working on a specific product. Just tell us a little bit about that product that you're working on and how this idea of comprehension relates to that. 

[00:04:26] Anne Lucas: Yeah, absolutely. 

[00:04:28] Anne Lucas: So it is a K-8 digital supplemental program that covers all aspects of reading from phonics all the way up to close reading and comprehension.

[00:04:41] Anne Lucas: And I think as part of building this, one of the big questions that we were asking ourselves was, how can we create a program that is going to help teachers not teach comprehension, but how can it help teachers with comprehension? And what are some of these skills that we can include that will move the needle for students as they're reading. And we started to kind of go down a research path that sort of led us to, you know, there are a variety of these different, what we would call comprehension microskills, that are at play as students are reading. And, you know, we started to just create more and more activities in our program around that, that we saw would really help students with comprehension.

[00:05:29] Susan Lambert: That's really cool because we haven't spent a lot of time on our Science of Reading podcast talking about specific aspects, if you will, of the Simple View of Reading. We've talked about them sort of in big ideas and big buckets, but really today, this idea of comprehension, we're gonna sort of dig down into the weeds of what that looks like.

[00:05:50] Susan Lambert: And so, it's really cool that in the process of creating a product like that, you had to do this deep dive into comprehension, which is a really complex task. And the orchestration of a lot of different things need to happen. So maybe we should just start by having you define for us in general terms what comprehension is. I think sometimes we take it for granted that everybody knows what we're talking about. 

[00:06:15] Anne Lucas: Yeah. So this is a tough question 'cause I think there's a lot of different definitions of what comprehension is. And so I'll share what it is to me and what it means to me. To me, comprehension is making sense and meaning while you read.

[00:06:32] Anne Lucas: So you have the ability to discuss, analyze, and form an opinion about something after you read it. And I will say that my definition has changed a little bit since I've kind of been looking more into this comprehension research. I would often, a lot of times think about it as something that just kind of happened after students read.

[00:06:53] Anne Lucas: Like I think of the really common image when we think of comprehension is, student reads a book and then the teacher starts to ask the student questions after they finish reading. So comprehension being what happens, quote, after. It's like the papers they write, the questions they ask or the answer, but the more I really started to look into it, the more I saw there's actually a lot more going on while students are reading that's important to their comprehension overall, as well. 

[00:07:21] Susan Lambert: Interesting. I think I've heard you talk about what you call that missing link in comprehension. Is that sort of what you're getting at?

[00:07:29] Anne Lucas: Yes, exactly. Exactly.

[00:07:31] Susan Lambert: Great. Okay. How about you explain more, more about that?

[00:07:34] Anne Lucas: Sure. So, I think this idea of why comprehension is so hard to teach and is there something missing, has always kind of been nagging me.

[00:07:42] Anne Lucas: And luckily, you know, as I said, when I joined Amplify, there was a group of folks here and a group of researchers who were also feeling nagged by the same question. And so we worked with a really large group of researchers, like, Jane Oakhill, Kate Kane, I'm not sure if you're familiar with them.

[00:07:58] Anne Lucas: And they also had this nagging feeling about why is comprehension so difficult and what can we do about it? And the interesting thing was we found that there was a lot of research that had already been done on the importance of comprehension during reading. And it showed that students who struggle with reading comprehension are often also weak in underlying language and literacy skills that are required of them to create a coherent network of ideas about what they read while they're reading it. So in other words, as students read the picture or the model that they're creating in their mind of what's happening in the text could be wrong or could be different from another student if they're lacking these certain skills that are collectively being called comprehension microskills.

[00:08:47] Susan Lambert: Interesting. And so this is beyond, I mean, I think we all agree that decoding is an element of this, but these kinds of skills are something different than the idea of decoding. Can you provide some examples of that? 

[00:09:02] Anne Lucas: Yeah, definitely. And I, think they are different skills. I've had the same thought of, you know, decoding is the thing that happens while kids are reading. But I think the truth is that language is just so complex and particularly, as we're asking students to read more and more complex texts , it becomes even more true that the language and interpreting that language is really challenging.

[00:09:25] Anne Lucas: So a lot of these skills aren't anything new, but it's just looking at them in the context of reading comprehension is new. So I'll give you an example. If I have a sentence, Peter lent his car to Olivia because she had missed the train. It's pretty easy for all of us to understand. Who is "she" referring to if I were to ask you that?

[00:09:47] Susan Lambert: Olivia. Olivia. Did I right? Did I get that right?

[00:09:49] Anne Lucas: You got it right. Good job.

[00:09:52] Anne Lucas: So fairly straightforward. And so we can really build this picture easily in our minds. You know, Peter handing the car keys to Olivia because she's rushing out the door to catch the train, or something along those lines.

[00:10:04] Anne Lucas: But now, if the sentence were to read , Peter lent his car to David because he had missed the train. Now, who is the he referring to? 

[00:10:15] Susan Lambert: Hmm. Well, probably David.

[00:10:18] Anne Lucas: Right. But you have to kind of pause and think about it, right?

[00:10:20] Susan Lambert: I did.

[00:10:21] Anne Lucas: And so that requires what we call a resolution or it's almost like a little, mini-inference to make sense of that, where you hear this word "he", but now all of a sudden there's Peter and David, and you have to make sense of, which one of those two could that be referring to? And think about why it wouldn't make sense if it were Peter. And so for a lot of our beginning readers and struggling readers, that type of resolution, it's essentially like pronoun antecedent resolution, researchers will often use the fancy term anaphora to describe this.

[00:10:53] Susan Lambert: Ooh, that's a great word.

[00:10:56] Anne Lucas: It is, but you know, I think that type of work is really challenging for them. And if they're not kind of taking a pause while they're reading to make sense of that, they might end up with a completely different picture of what that sentence is saying. 

[00:11:12] Susan Lambert: Wow. So that is, I mean, that's comprehension at a sentence level. A reader that could decode would be able to read that sentence, maybe decoding all the words and very fluently. But if they didn't understand the connection of that "he", the who the he is talking about, I could see where you're not going to gain meaning the appropriate meaning from that. 

[00:11:34] Anne Lucas: Yeah, exactly. 

[00:11:36] Anne Lucas: And I think it gets to be even more complex if there are noun substitutions. They talk a lot about the distance between where the pronoun and its antecedent is, and the farther away it is, the harder that is for struggling readers. So there's a lot of different degrees of difficulty with this as well. 

[00:11:56] Susan Lambert: Hmm. So I heard you say that even in your own definition of comprehension that you used to think of comprehension as what happens after you're done with some portion of a text. So something you would answer, something that you would produce after your reading.

[00:12:17] Susan Lambert: Right now we're talking about what you're doing while you're reading. So I think I've heard you say that there's sort of this distinction then between product or the end goal and process of what's happening during the reading process. Can you talk a little bit more about that distinction?

[00:12:35] Anne Lucas: Yeah, definitely. So I think , when you think about the process, or, well, let me take a step back. I think you summarized it perfectly, which is that we often think about comprehension as a product or something that happens after kids read. But I think with the growing body of research around these comprehension microskills, it's showing that, the ability for a student to build a model or a network of ideas or a picture in their mind, happens while they're reading. It becomes an automatic process eventually. So it's something that's really hard for us as fluent readers to unpack. But it's the idea that as students are reading, this model or this picture, or this network of ideas that they're building is constantly changing as they're learning new information.

[00:13:27] Anne Lucas: And so they have to be able to use the, these smaller microskills to understand what's happening at the sentence level, and then apply that to their broader model of what's happening in the story overall, so that they can then have those conversations about analyzing or discussing what happened in the story.

[00:13:49] Susan Lambert: Hmm. So are there other kinds of skills in this process world, that kids are using or maybe not kids are using, maybe I should say it a different way. Are there other examples of this process part that skilled comprehenders use besides the example that you've given us already?

[00:14:10] Anne Lucas: Yeah. And what's really interesting about this is there's a growing body of research that's happening now. So I think I mentioned that there's a lot that's already been done. And I think we're still kind of uncovering how all of these things work together.

[00:14:24] Anne Lucas: And so, I think that within the research that we've looked at, there are many skills, maybe as many as 17, that are at play here. But we've sort of narrowed it down to try to find the ones that are gonna have the biggest bang for your buck, essentially. What are the ones that kids really struggle with?

[00:14:42] Anne Lucas: But also the research is showing that with repeated practice students are able to improve their comprehension overall. So we found, the one that I mentioned already, which is that the pronoun antecedent relationships or anaphora. Another example is what we call connective words or marker words.

[00:15:03] Anne Lucas: And an example of that would be a word like, "and" or "but" or "so" or "because." These words that are, really common to us and often only part of instruction as maybe a grammar exercise or a writing exercise or something like that. But the idea with those words is that the purpose of that word in a sentence is really joining two ideas together.

[00:15:28] Anne Lucas: So the word "and" is signifying that the two ideas that that word is connecting are related in some way, as opposed to a word like, "but" which is saying that those are different. Or the word "because," which is saying that, you know, one of these ideas has a cause and effect relationship with another one of the ideas.

[00:15:49] Susan Lambert: Hmm. 

[00:15:50] Anne Lucas: And so what the research was showing is that the struggling readers and, particularly with this one, English language learners as well, if they don't understand what the meaning of those really seemingly small and inconsequential words is, they're going to struggle with the relationship between the two ideas.

[00:16:12] Anne Lucas: An example of that could be something like a sentence: The girl scraped her knee because she fell off the bike. So we know that that word "because" is signifying there's a cause and effect relationship. So if we were to say, why did the girl scrap her knee? We could easily say, because she fell off the bike.

[00:16:31] Anne Lucas: But if you don't really know that that word, "because" is supposed to signify some type of cause and effect relationship, as you're reading the sentence and building this model in your mind, you might just fill in that gap yourself and say, "Oh, maybe she scraped her knee on a tree, and then she fell off her bike," and have a totally different model in your mind of that sentence. Something that's so seemingly simple to a fluent reader, but then all of a sudden can be easily misinterpreted just by one little word.

[00:17:00] Susan Lambert: Wow, that's really interesting. And so then, are you saying the best way for us then to get kids to understand this is an explicit teaching of what those words mean and how they're used, and practice with that?

[00:17:11] Anne Lucas: Yeah. Exactly. And so that's, at least for me when I was looking at this research, I think what made me the most excited is it's really easy to target a lot of these skills in your classroom. And we particularly focused on a lot of these comprehension microskills because the research was showing that repeated practice with them yielded greater results in comprehension overall.

[00:17:37] Anne Lucas: So it's something that you can do, you know, you don't have to completely change your curriculum, you don't have to completely change the way you're teaching, it's something where you can do a quick little direct instruction on the word "he" and what that means and who that's referring to. And then you can start to just point it out in your classroom. If you're doing a read-aloud and there's a particularly complex sentence, you can quickly just write it up on a sentence strip and start to have conversations with students about what is this word "it" referring to? Which noun is "it" referring to? Things like that, just to get kids thinking about it. And I think that what's interesting about these and particularly with the teachers that I've spoken to about this, is a lot of English language learner specialists or speech language pathologists that I've talked to, they're like, "Oh yeah, of course. We do this all the time."

[00:18:28] Anne Lucas: This is like common practice for them. But they've just never thought about it in the context of reading comprehension and how that can really play an important role, not just in the student's language abilities, but in their ability to comprehend a text as well. 

[00:18:45] Susan Lambert: That's fascinating because, you know, even me being a teacher and I'm sort of reflecting now back on how I could have done a better job with comprehension...

[00:18:55] Anne Lucas: oh, it's a curse as a teacher.

[00:18:56] Susan Lambert: Isn't it? Yeah. The curse of knowledge, right? But we, and I fall into this even now, that we interchangeably use the comprehension skills and comprehension strategies, and we think that they mean the same thing, but they actually don't mean the same thing. Can you talk to us about how they're different?

[00:19:14] Anne Lucas: Yeah. Oh, that's such a good point. A big topic of discussion, I know. I guess to me, I see skills as being isolated. Something that you can practice over and over again and get better at it. Whereas a strategy to me is much more about thinking and decision-making, how are you going to approach something? How can you change that approach if it doesn't work? It requires a little bit more flexibility. As it relates to reading, I see skills as being things like, I think you brought it up, like phonics instruction. The letters in the book are gonna be the same. Those are never gonna change.

[00:19:55] Anne Lucas: And once you kind of cracked that code, you can apply that to any English book that you read. But, I think applying a strategy like, I think one common comprehension strategy that's talked about is summarizing or wondering or things like that, you can't apply that in the same way to every book. You might try and it might not work, and you need to try something else. And so I think that a lot of times that can be really challenging. And I think that's partially what makes teaching comprehension so difficult is because it is really different to apply those to different books that you read.

[00:20:32] Anne Lucas: And so I think what I'm hoping to advocate for here in talking with you is that there are these comprehension microskills that can actually fall within that skills category. And it's something related to comprehension that can be practiced over and over again and is going to help improve overall comprehension since those strategies are not something that you can do with repeated at-bat practice.

[00:20:59] Susan Lambert: Got it. So the idea of understanding these words like, "and" and "but" and "because," sort of, once you master the skill of that, you can generalize that and put that into any kind of context.

[00:21:11] Anne Lucas: Exactly. Exactly. And what's really exciting about the research we looked at is it spans, like I said, language, reading, and even writing. I think that once students, particularly with those connective words, I think once students had a really solid grasp of those, the research was showing really great creativity in how they were combining sentences and putting ideas together and it's really exciting, I know, for me anyway, 'cause I think anytime you can get a quick win like that in the classroom is huge.

[00:21:41] Susan Lambert: Yeah. Yeah. It's just another place where we talk about the reciprocity of both reading and writing and being able to apply those skills in both places helps you actually become more competent.

[00:21:54] Anne Lucas: Absolutely. Yeah.

[00:21:55] Susan Lambert: This seems like a really important distinction, right? About this idea of these comprehension microskills that could really help students in their comprehension process, which will impact then the comprehension product, if you will, at the end. Why do you think it hasn't, you know, these sort of microskills, why do you think it hasn't gotten more attention?

[00:22:20] Anne Lucas: That's a great question. And the interesting thing is it's not a new concept. There's actually a ton of research on this, but it largely, as I said, is just as it relates to language skills. And I think that these types of things have either been thought as like a language processing exercise or grammar exercises, maybe a little bit in writing.

[00:22:40] Anne Lucas: I think it's just that we haven't thought a lot yet about how these apply to reading and to reading comprehension overall, even though the research is pretty promising that it can help with all of these aspects of things. So I'm hoping that, it will start to become, you know, more of a topic, and I think already there's been an increasing amount of research into the role that these microskills play. 

[00:23:04] Susan Lambert: Yeah. And I know. For example, you have presented at many conferences and talked to hundreds of educators about this. What's the sort of response you get from them when you introduce this idea of comprehension could be at this sentence level or at this really discreet level? 

[00:23:23] Anne Lucas: Yeah. Honestly, there's two responses that I get depending on who's in the room. I think if there are teachers in the room who are English language learner specialists, or who work particularly with students who have language processing difficulties, I think for them it's sort of a " yes, of course we do this all the time. This is a regular part of our instruction." And maybe they hadn't thought about it in terms of reading comprehension, but they quickly see the connection and are kind of like, "yes, we will continue to do this."

[00:23:56] Anne Lucas: But with typically like general education classroom teachers, they sort of have this light bulb or eureka moment of, "oh my gosh, I didn't realize that, my students might be struggling with this. And I think there was one teacher in particular, who kind of crystallized it perfectly when she said, " I always ask my students when they read to make a picture in their mind as they're reading. And I never thought that that picture might be different from what I was reading or from what someone else might be reading or that they're really having a hard time building that picture." And I thought that was just a really powerful " aha" moment of just how important these things are.

[00:24:37] Susan Lambert: Yeah. And not only, maybe they have a different picture in their head than what I have, maybe kids sitting next to each other have even different pictures in their head.

[00:24:47] Anne Lucas: Exactly. Exactly.

[00:24:50] Susan Lambert: So we've had a couple episodes where we have been talking about and exploring the importance of background knowledge for reading comprehension. How do you think this serves as an additional element to the background knowledge idea? 

[00:25:03] Anne Lucas: Yeah, I think that's a really interesting question. I think it's a great compliment, to it because I think we know background knowledge is incredibly important and is something that we need to integrate into instruction and into curriculum. And I think you know, this just sort of compliments the idea that the more tools we give kids to grapple with texts and concepts, the better they'll be able to do it. So, I think practicing these skills in that way can only just continue to increase their comprehension overall.

[00:25:41] Susan Lambert: Great. And then I would say, you mentioned Jane Oakhill and I know she's written a book called Understanding and Teaching Reading Comprehension, so we will link our listeners to that in the show notes. If folks are looking for more information to learn more about these sort of comprehension microskills, where would you point them?

[00:26:03] Anne Lucas: Yeah, so I think Jane Oakhill's book is a great place to start. I also, Susan, have, so we have a white paper on this topic that I'd be happy to send to you if we can link that in the show notes as well.

[00:26:14] Susan Lambert: Absolutely.

[00:26:15] Anne Lucas: And yeah, I think those would be two good places to start.

[00:26:18] Susan Lambert: That's awesome. That's super helpful.

[00:26:20] Susan Lambert: This has been just really eye-opening and in me thinking about and in preparing to talk to you today, again, I've made some new connections myself. And I'll say it again, if thinking back to my own classroom, I taught third grade for most of my teaching careers, but how much of this actually resonates with what I could have done better in terms of simple shifts in the instruction to help my students be better comprehenders.

[00:26:46] Susan Lambert: But with that, I'd like to just sort of wrap this whole thing up and, I always like to close by saying, what's the one thing you really want our listeners to take away or think about or to consider more about as it relates to this idea of the missing link in comprehension?

[00:27:05] Anne Lucas: Oh, yeah. One thing, so hard.

[00:27:07] Susan Lambert: Or two. I mean, I could give you two if you want two. 

[00:27:10] Anne Lucas: You're very generous. I think the one thing would be just to be mindful that the process of reading comprehension is very multifaceted and encompasses a lot of different skills beyond what we think of typically, which is usually decoding and fluency, I think is what we think of during reading. And so, yeah, I guess I'd say just be mindful that I think there's more at play there, and particularly with our most struggling readers and our English language learners, to just keep that in mind as we're selecting texts, as we're helping them comprehend, and helping them become lifelong readers.

[00:27:50] Susan Lambert: Great. Well, thanks so much, Anne. Really appreciate you joining us today. 

[00:27:55] Anne Lucas: Thank you, Susan. It was a pleasure to be here. 

[00:28:00] Susan Lambert: That was Anne Lucas who joined me back on Season 1, Episode 7. She's associate vice president, product literacy suite initiatives and supplementals at Amplify. I hope you enjoyed that blast from the past.

[00:28:14] Susan Lambert: Please don't forget to register for our summer learning series on July 22, Rethinking Reading Comprehension Reflections on Catts and Oakhill's Research. Find out more information and sign up for free at amplify.com/sorsummerlearning. We'll also have a link in the show notes. And next time on the podcast, I can't wait to share the second edition of Science of Reading Essentials, which will pull together key insights from the research on comprehension. 

[00:28:47] Speaker: Really, the quality of the question we ask has everything to do with the quality of the comprehension we can expect. 

[00:28:56] Speaker 2: I started off with some hypotheses and it took maybe about a week and a half to have some of those hypotheses shattered.

[00:29:04] Susan Lambert: That's coming up. Science of Reading: The Podcast is brought to you by Amplify. I'm Susan Lambert. Thank you so much for listening.