Science of Reading Essentials: Comprehension

In this special Essentials episode of Science of Reading: The Podcast, Susan Lambert pulls from past episodes to distill reading comprehension insights from experts Hugh Catts, Ph.D.; Sharon Vaughn, Ph.D.; and Reid Smith, Ph.D. Listeners will walk away from this episode with a foundational introduction to the complexities of reading comprehension, and gain an understanding of topics such as reframing comprehension as an outcome rather than a skill, choosing the right texts and asking the right questions, cultivating long term memory and knowledge recall, and understanding the real purpose of reading. 

Show notes: 

• Access the listening guide—and other free, high-quality resources—at our brand new professional learning page: http://amplify.com/science-of-reading/professional-learning 
• Join our community Facebook Group: www.facebook.com/groups/scienceofreading

Quotes:

“This Essentials episode does not answer everything about comprehension. All we're doing here is building a foundation, understanding that comprehension isn't a skill, it's complex.” —Susan Lambert

“ For the most part, if we're paying attention, if we can read words efficiently and know what they mean and have background knowledge, it yields comprehension.” —Sharon Vaughn

“ Some people say that the purpose of reading is comprehension. It's not the purpose of reading. The purpose of reading is whatever you're comprehending for.” —Hugh Catts 

“[There’s] a strong literature base that tells us that one of the differences between poor readers and strong readers is their ability to notice when there are inconsistencies in the text, and have strategies that they can employ to resolve those inconsistencies.” —Reid Smith

Episode Timestamps*
01:00 What are “Science of Reading: Essentials” episodes
02:00 Introduction to comprehension
05:00 Defining comprehension
07:00 Reading comprehension as an outcome
09:00 The purpose of reading with Hugh Catts
11:00 Comprehension vs foundational reading skills
17:00 The importance of text and asking the right questions with Sharon Vaughn
20:00 Discussion on leveled reading
26:00 Background knowledge with Reid Smith
28:00 Long term memory and knowledge recall
31:00 Final thoughts, tips, & encouragement
34:00 Key takeaways from Susan
36:00 Season 10 preview
39:00 Coming up next: Tim Shanahan
*Timestamps are approximate, rounded to nearest minute

Transcript

[00:00:00] Hugh Catts: A major insight for me was that we've been thinking about comprehension as a component of reading, but comprehension's really not a component of reading. It's a big shift in the way that we think about comprehension.

[00:00:16] Susan Lambert: This is Susan Lambert, and welcome to the latest edition of Science of Reading Essentials, a special series of Science of Reading: The Podcast from Amplify. On these episodes, we're doing something just a little different. We're trying to pull together important concepts in literacy development and give you, our listeners, sort of an idea of a thread and a pathway through this particular concept, such that you could dive deeper into elements of that and really start to gain a bigger picture or a bigger understanding of these particular concepts.

[00:00:57] Susan Lambert: On our very first edition of Science of Reading [00:01:00] Essentials, we took on the topic of writing, giving you the key information you need to help your students write more effectively. That episode, by the way, is available right in our podcast feed, or you can find it on our new accompanying resource site, amplify.com/soressentials. But today, I'm thrilled to share that in this episode we're focusing on comprehension. 

[00:01:27] Hugh Catts: I just, you know, suggest that we have to think a little bit more deeply in general about comprehension and start developing some models that will allow us to do that. 

[00:01:38] Sharon Vaughn: Really, the quality of the question we ask has everything to do with the quality of the comprehension we can expect.

[00:01:47] Reid Smith: Really the first port of call, for us, was to start doing a search through the literature about background knowledge and its influence on reading comprehension. I started off with some hypotheses and it took maybe about a week and a half to have some of those hypotheses shattered. 

[00:02:05] Susan Lambert: So our second Science of Reading Essentials episode is all about comprehension.

[00:02:13] Susan Lambert: From my point of view, comprehension needs to be at the top of the list because it's the end goal or the end game, right? We all want kids to be able to comprehend text. And all of the efforts that we put in to teach reading, or teach language, all feed into or are contributors to this ultimate goal of reading comprehension. But comprehension is complicated.

[00:02:40] Susan Lambert: The factors that contribute to comprehension are vast. It's actually a really big topic that we don't often spend time digging into. But if you stick around to the end of this episode, you will have a much better understanding of the complexities and nuances involved with comprehension. You won't have all the answers, but by the end of the episode, you will have a better framework in which to start thinking about comprehension, what that looks like for your own self as you're reading and comprehending texts, and also what that means for your students as you're helping them develop depth of comprehension.

[00:03:26] Susan Lambert: And without further ado, welcome to Science of Reading Essentials, comprehension. I always love starting with understanding what the concepts and the words mean when we're talking about something. You know, like this, like comprehension, because I say the word comprehension and maybe people think, "Oh yeah, I know what we're talking about." But because it's such a big concept and because reading researchers have looked at elements of comprehension differently and what their impact is, I think it's really important for us to hear from some of the greats that have been around doing this work a long time, what they think about comprehension, how they view comprehension.

[00:04:05] Susan Lambert: So I think starting with definitions are always amazing and I even like to start professional development opportunities by having people think about and defining words for themselves. So maybe a good thing listeners for you to start with is, take a moment and try to craft your own definition of comprehension.

[00:04:29] Susan Lambert: Maybe even pause. Pause here and write down a definition of comprehension. You can actually use the accompanying listening guide to jot down your definition of comprehension. And the listening guide you can access either by clicking on the link in the show notes, or find it on our brand new resource page, amplify.com/soressentials.

[00:04:58] Susan Lambert: And then as we're going through this episode, listen for how your definition differs from, or is similar, to some of the concepts that you hear in this particular Essentials episode. So we're going to listen to the definition of comprehension from Dr. Sharon Vaughn, who is, well, I probably don't have to introduce Sharon Vaughn to this audience, but she is a longtime researcher in the world of reading science, and she's the Manuel J. Justiz Endowed Chair in Education, and the executive director of the Meadow Center for Preventing Educational Risk at the University of Texas, Austin.

[00:05:43] Susan Lambert: Let's listen back to her great definition from Season 8.

[00:05:48] Susan Lambert: Let's just talk a little bit about reading comprehension and what reading comprehension really is. And you have a quote that I absolutely love. I have carried it with me since the first time I heard you say it, and I can't remember where that was, but the quote is: You can't teach reading comprehension.

[00:06:06] Susan Lambert: You can't teach reading comprehension. It's an outcome. Can you tell us about that? 

[00:06:12] Sharon Vaughn: Oh gosh. Thank you so much for saying that, because I think that, you know, especially around the Science of Reading, many people are sort of obsessed with the idea that the Science of Reading is phonics. And they are like, "Oh my gosh." That sort of gives them sort of a justifiable cause against the Science of Reading because it isn't just phonics.

[00:06:32] Sharon Vaughn: Well, of course it's not. However, it is quite defensively impossible to learn to read if you cannot read words. So, if you wanna get to comprehension, the most important thing you have to get to is accurate and efficient word reading. And of course, the mechanism for getting to accurate and efficient word reading are things like phonemic awareness and phonics.

[00:07:03] Sharon Vaughn: But the point is, you have to be able to read these words. And here's the second thing: you have to know what they mean. So vocabulary is important. You gotta know how to read 'em, you gotta know what they mean. And those two developments work together, and then with adequate background knowledge, comprehension comes for free for the vast majority of students.

[00:07:28] Sharon Vaughn: So comprehension is an outcome, and it's based on being able to read words accurately, know what they mean, have adequate background knowledge, and also, you know, being able to make inferences and sort of, if you will, not check yourself when you go to text. For the most part, if we're paying attention, if we can read words efficiently and know what they mean and have background knowledge, it yields comprehension.

[00:07:54] Susan Lambert: Next, let's hear from Dr. Hugh Catts, professor of the School of Communication Science and Disorders at Florida State University. He helped us kick off Season 9.

[00:08:05] Hugh Catts: So if I was going to define comprehension, it's not a single thing, and that's the problem. We want it to be a single thing, but it depends upon what you're reading and why you're reading.

[00:08:16] Hugh Catts: And some people say that the purpose of reading is comprehension. It's not the purpose of reading. The purpose of reading is whatever you're comprehending for.

[00:08:24] Hugh Catts: Ah. Right.

[00:08:24] Hugh Catts: So sometimes all you want to do is find a fact within the text that you're reading, right? You just want one little bit of info. Another time, all you want is the gist. You only kind of wanna know what's happening. So when I read the, you know, newspaper feeds that I get in the morning, most of the stories I just want to kind of a sense of it.

[00:08:44] Hugh Catts: Right? In other cases, it's really important for you. Right? So I'll give you an example when that might be. So when you look on the web for a disease that you may have found out, you just had, or one of your friends have, [00:09:00] the level of comprehension there is gonna be much deeper. 

[00:09:03] Susan Lambert: Right. 

[00:09:03] Hugh Catts: Right? You're gonna spend much more time trying to get at the meaning of it, if you will, comprehend it. What comprehension is, it's the interaction of what you bring into that reading situation and what you already know about it, and your motivation and purpose to comprehend it. 

[00:09:25] Susan Lambert: That's brilliant. I love it. 

[00:09:26] Hugh Catts: One of my colleagues calls it a standard of coherence. It's what's your standard of coherence? That is, how much sense you want to make of this? And it's not the same on everything you read. 

[00:09:41] Susan Lambert: So you've listened to two definitions of comprehension.

[00:09:45] Susan Lambert: Good place to stop again and go back and see how those square with the definition that you actually wrote down in the listening guide, if you did that, or jotted down on your piece of paper, and add to your definitions and think about concepts that they talked about that maybe you didn't consider in the process of reading comprehension.

[00:10:05] Susan Lambert: So I think that every educator in every single classroom-- whether it's a literacy classroom, math, science, it doesn't matter-- every educator understands the importance of comprehension. And if we look back to the National Reading Panel, their 2000 report highlighted the importance of comprehension, right?

[00:10:26] Susan Lambert: You've probably heard about the five essential components of reading, which stems from that National Reading Panel, or NRP report, and comprehension was one of them. It's just essential to think about when we're talking about early literacy. The problem is, is that the way that we typically think about comprehension is comprehension as a skill. That it's just something we teach kids how to comprehend, and once we teach them, we can throw them into any text and they will comprehend that text equally well. And that's just not true. It's not the same as phonological and phonemic awareness, that once you make that connection or decoding, once you understand that process, you build to automaticity.

[00:11:16] Susan Lambert: Those are skills, foundational literacy skills. This thing about comprehension, it sits on language comprehension, sits on the top of the rope, right? It's a different side of the Reading Rope. And comprehension is a thing that develops across our entire lifetime. This is how Hugh Catts explained that key fundamental distinction between comprehension and foundational reading skills.

[00:11:47] Hugh Catts: When I first started, I thought about comprehension just like just about everybody else does. And that is that it was an aspect of reading that you could measure with a standardized test and get some estimate of ability, and then you could instruct or intervene and find some change in that ability. You know, over a shorter period of time you could see change in that ability. But you know, over the last 10 or more years, I've kind of recognized that that's not really the case. That it's not something that you can measure with a standardized test in the same way that we measure other aspects of reading. And it's not something that's easily changed through instruction or intervention.

[00:12:29] Hugh Catts: We think about change over a longer period of time, changing comprehension occurs over the lifetime as opposed to these other aspects of reading. And I think a major insight for me was that we've been thinking about comprehension as a component of reading, and that's what most people do. And we've got the five, the big five or the five pillars of reading.

[00:12:53] Hugh Catts: But comprehensions is really not a component of reading . It doesn't really share anything. And when I say  comprehension, I wanna put vocabulary in there. It got separated in the NRP report because there was research separately on comprehension vocabulary, but I kind of think about those as the same thing.

[00:13:11] Hugh Catts: And then those two are not like the other three aspects of the big five in the sense that they're not skills that you could train and then apply across the board. I always use the example, swimming. If you learn how to swim, you can swim in a lake, a pool, an ocean, whatever. But that's not the case for comprehension. You can't learn to comprehend and then take that out into different situations for different purposes. You can learn some things that will help you, but in general, it's the topic and the purpose that are gonna impact how well you understand something. 

[00:13:50] Susan Lambert: Hmm. 

[00:13:50] Hugh Catts: And recognizing that, it's a big shift in the way that we think about comprehension.

[00:13:56] Hugh Catts: It's more like listening comprehension or movie comprehension. When you watch a movie, you're actually engaged in building an understanding of what's going on in that movie. And that's not all that different than when you read a book. Very similar in the types of cognitive activities that you engage in. There're some important differences, but they are similar for the most part. 

[00:14:18] Susan Lambert: Hmm. You know, that makes me think of one of my big "ahas" with comprehension was, you know, comprehension isn't, you either comprehend it or you don't comprehend it. It's not black-and-white, either-or. But it's sort of, how well do you comprehend it or how differently do you comprehend it.

[00:14:37] Susan Lambert: So going back to your movie idea, if you and I go watch the same movie, we're going to come outta that movie and talk about maybe some really different things or get some really different models of what was happening in that movie from each other. Same when you're reading a book, right? Like is that a little bit what you're talking about?

[00:14:54] Hugh Catts: Yeah, kind of. I mean, I didn't bring in the individual differences in that way, but comprehension's a combination of what the reader brings into the situation of reading and the book and purpose that they're reading, the text and the purpose of it. Same way with what you walk into the movie theater with, is interacts with what the storyline and the, you know, visual images, whatever's in the movie. The other comparison that works even better is listening comprehension. But reading comprehension and listening comprehension are very similar in that the listener brings in certain knowledge about the topic and certain interests in the topic, and that impacts how well they understand or what, in your words, what type of understanding they have about the particular text. 

[00:15:41] Susan Lambert: And when we're thinking about our students' comprehension, it's not a single score or a great, not so great, right? There are multiple factors they bring into their comprehension.

[00:15:53] Susan Lambert: And the text is one of those factors. The text is the context in which we're placing students, which will be a major factor in their comprehension, and as you're about to hear, the questions we ask are also critical. The importance of text and the questions about the text is something Dr. Sharon Vaughn emphasized when she joined us back on Season 8.

[00:16:21] Susan Lambert: Dr. Vaughn came on the show to talk about the What Works Clearinghouse Practice Guide on providing reading interventions for students in grades four through nine. Something you'll hear her refer to in a bit. But the important point here is that text matters. Also asking the right questions about that text really matters as well.

[00:16:45] Susan Lambert: Let's listen in. 

[00:16:47] Sharon Vaughn: Asking questions is, as you know, extremely different. Asking the right questions. Asking questions that get students to think about and wonder about what they've read and integrate it with what they know and think from other things. That's where the real learning juice is. Asking questions that require me to go back into the text and find one word answers, you know, what color was the boy's hat when he was riding the pony? Well, I mean, I can find that. 

[00:17:21] Susan Lambert: Right? 

[00:17:22] Sharon Vaughn: And I don't think those questions are useless, but they're pretty close to useless. We really have to figure out how to ask questions like: what about, how, why, when did this happen? And why do you think the author wanted that?

[00:17:44] Sharon Vaughn: So really the quality of the question we ask, has everything to do with the quality of the comprehension we can expect. And we think of these questions, Susan, as coming after students read. Not bad. You know, we should do some of that. But it's also not a bad idea to say, you know, "So far, here's what we've read about Napoleon. In the next page, something is going to happen that changes the way Napoleon thinks about how to lead men. As you read this, see if you can figure out what that is and how that affected him." 

[00:18:30] Susan Lambert: Hmm. That's very thought-provoking in terms of the quality of our comprehend, I think this is what you said. I'm gonna say it back to you again.

[00:18:39] Susan Lambert: The quality of the comprehension or how we're assessing the quality of students' comprehension is directly related to the types of questions we're asking or the quality of the questions we're asking. So there's a relationship between those two things. 

[00:18:56] Sharon Vaughn: Thank you for putting a headline on those comments, because that's a really nice headline. Another headline along with yours is, Text Matters. 

[00:19:06] Susan Lambert: Hmm. 

[00:19:07] Sharon Vaughn: You know, I think we have this idea for so long, Susan, that every child should know what their level is in their leveled reading, and every child should read in their leveled reading box. Golly forbid if you pick up a harder or easier box. Well, I don't know about you, but how would you like to have a box that you could read in and not lower or higher? 

[00:19:37] Susan Lambert: Yeah. No thank you. That's interesting because I think you also talk a lot about nutrition as it relates to instruction and making sure we have a good balance of that. Is that right? 

[00:19:50] Sharon Vaughn: I think so. I mean, you know, in the guidance document that you referred to, one of the things they suggest, or we suggest, I can't blame them since I'm the first author, we suggest. But, the recommendation is to integrate, stretch text into students' reading.

[00:20:07] Sharon Vaughn: And the thinking behind that is that as students are behind, because this is focusing on students who are struggling readers, we need to understand that for many of these students accessing grade-level text has never occurred. So they have had a steady diet of, if you will, text that has limited background knowledge, marginalized vocabulary, and text that's under complicated. And because of the steady diet of that, now I don't think they should have none of that. People need to practice reading what they can't read. But they can't only practice reading what they can't read. With strong teacher support, reading texts that are challenging can be interesting, fun, engaging, and profitable.

[00:21:01] Susan Lambert: Hmm. I like how you said that. 

[00:21:04] Susan Lambert: Interesting, engaging, and profitable. Can you talk a little bit more about what you mean by profitable? 

[00:21:10] Sharon Vaughn: Well, what I mean is this, so imagine Susan, that I'm one of the students you're teaching and imagine me as a fifth grader, which is not actually that hard. I act that way quite a bit.

[00:21:25] Sharon Vaughn: So imagine me as a fifth grader. And imagine that I read on the second grade level. So you can imagine that over the last six years of my schooling, the kind of low-level, mind numbing, simplified texts I've been exposed to, right? Because I have to read my level books. 

[00:21:47] Susan Lambert: Mm-hmm. 

[00:21:48] Sharon Vaughn: You know, I think people do a really good job trying to make those books interesting.

[00:21:52] Sharon Vaughn: But, nevertheless, I'm in fifth grade and these books are quite a bit simpler than what I am as a developed fifth-grader. Now, imagine that there's a topic I'm interested in and imagine you find a book about trains on the fourth grade level. We are able to work through it because as a seasoned, knowledgeable teacher, you know what words to show me ahead of time. You know how to tell me how to reread, you know how to read the paragraph first and for me. And say, "I'm gonna read it first, and then you're gonna read it." You know how to support me, so that accessing this text is profitable for me. 

[00:22:37] Susan Lambert: Typically, we think about comprehension being on the shoulders of the reader, right?

[00:22:45] Susan Lambert: And we often forget that an important consideration to comprehending text is actually the text itself. So, a rigorous, interesting, full-of-rich-information text is going to yield a different kind of interaction between the reader than something that is super easy, or a text that might be patterned, or what we might call a level text.

[00:23:16] Susan Lambert: So we have to always think about reading comprehension in the context of the text that's in front of the reader. And in addition to that, fostering or helping to understand how well a reader is comprehending that text relies on the kind of questions that are asked about the text. And so the text is super important and the questions we engage students with during that reading or after that reading are also really important.

[00:23:50] Susan Lambert: Those questions will signal to our students the level or the depth of comprehension in which we're expecting. So, you can ask a question that's just right there in the text, or you can ask a really, really deep, rich question that forces the reader to have to go back to the text, make some inferences, or think more deeply about that thing that they just read.

[00:24:17] Susan Lambert: So quick recap. When it comes to factors influencing a student's comprehension, we've already touched on several keys. Dr. Sharon Vaughn talked about the importance of accurate and efficient word reading. She talked about vocabulary and adequate background knowledge. She also detailed the importance of the text itself and the questions being asked.

[00:24:41] Susan Lambert: We heard from Dr. Hugh Catts about motivation and purpose. And he also emphasized the knowledge that a student brings to the text. To talk more about background knowledge, I want to bring one more expert voice into the fold. Reed Smith joined us to kick  off Season 8, in part to talk about a paper that he co-authored, The Role of Background Knowledge in Reading Comprehension: A Critical Review.

[00:25:09] Susan Lambert: Since that episode released, he completed his doctoral degree and Dr. Smith gave us a really good definition of background knowledge, and also of domain knowledge, which is a very specific kind of background knowledge. 

[00:25:23] Reid Smith: When we're specifically talking about background knowledge for reading, it's the knowledge that a reader brings to the act of reading, and that's knowledge that's either assumed by the writer in the act of a writing, but it also can be knowledges and experiences and other texts that a reader might have read that they can overlay with their current reading to make meaning of the text that they're reading at the moment. So, things that are contained in the long-term memory that are activated when somebody decides to read a piece of connected discourse would be sort of the broad brush definition of knowledge. 

[00:25:58] Susan Lambert: And then a little more specifically, you talk about domain knowledge being a subset of that background knowledge.

[00:26:04] Susan Lambert: What do you mean by domain knowledge and how does that actually help in terms of reading? 

[00:26:09] Reid Smith: So the domain knowledge, it's a set of connected knowledge around a particular defined topic or area of knowledge. So they are pieces of information and connections between pieces of information and knowledge that together form an understanding about a particular concept.

[00:26:28] Susan Lambert: A few interesting takeaways. One of 'em is this idea that once you have knowledge, it goes in your long-term memory and we can extract that knowledge from our long-term memory to bring it back up into our working memory. So if I'm reading a text about this, I'm going to activate some of that. I'm gonna make a connection and I know I'm gonna pull that knowledge I already have from long-term memory into my working memory.

[00:26:56] Susan Lambert: That actually helps me. It relieves the cognitive load, right, if you will, to talk in lingo? But it makes it a little bit easier for me to engage in that text. But there's a flip side to this. While having the right background knowledge facilitates comprehension, Dr. Smith explained that having misconceptions and long-term memory will have negative consequences.

[00:27:21] Reid Smith: Long-term memory makes no distinction between information that's correct or incorrect. It's just information and knowledge, and it gets recalled in the same way and integrated with the text in exactly the same way. So, of course, the incorrect knowledge would impact on our understanding, and that impacts the readers who are less confident and less able readers more than the stronger readers because they're less able to identify inconsistencies in the text and there's a strong evidence-base and a strong literature-base that tells us that one of the differences between poor readers and strong readers is their ability to notice when there are inconsistencies in the text and have strategies that they can employ to resolve those inconsistencies.

[00:28:05] Reid Smith: So, one of the interesting things was this idea that if you have a reader and they're reading a text and they're a poor reader and they have some piece of information in their long-term memory that contradicts something that's in the text, often, not only will they not notice that there's contradictory information there, but they will actually replace the contradictory element in the text with what they've got in their long-term memory. So, you ask them to recall elements from the text, they'll actually recall it and include the thing that sits in their long-term memory as if they've just read it. So if you had an understanding that sharks didn't eat meat and they liked cauliflower, and then you read in a text that they're these meat eating predators, then if you are a less able reader, there's certainly a chance that if you were to recall what you'd learned from that particular text, you would then recall that sharks really enjoy eating cauliflower, and they weren't necessarily meat eaters. So there's this idea that as we're constructing meaning of the text, sometimes we can ignore the text completely and replace it with information that sits in the long-term memory.

[00:29:11] Reid Smith: Sometimes when that information is correct, maybe that's a good thing, but if the information from the long-term memory is actually incorrect, that results in a faulty view and a poorer comprehension of the text that we've just read. 

[00:29:25] Susan Lambert: I think it's really important then, for us to start thinking about that coherency and how we're helping students acquire knowledge.

[00:29:35] Susan Lambert: Reid talks a little bit about coherency, like building that up over time because, you know, language and knowledge builds slowly, takes time to really become an expert or know a lot about something. But if we don't put the right information into that long-term memory, it's really gonna trip us up. And now as we hit the home stretch of this second edition of Science of Reading  Essentials, I'd like to share some final thoughts, tips, and encouragement from our group of comprehension experts.

[00:30:07] Sharon Vaughn: If you don't know how to read words, there are not enough comprehension strategies to get you to comprehension. If you don't know what the words mean, you can teach me 27 comprehension strategies and my comprehension will not improve. All I will do is be confused by all these strategies you've talked about.

[00:30:25] Sharon Vaughn: But if I have efficient word reading and know what the words mean and have background knowledge, then things like main idea and summarization and inferencing become very meaningful tasks that help me dig deeper into what I'm doing. 

[00:30:42] Hugh Catts: You know, the best predictor of whether you're gonna understand something or not is whether you already know something about it.

[00:30:47] Susan Lambert: Yeah. Yeah. 

[00:30:48] Hugh Catts: And so we sometimes forget that in our instruction, but it's not just knowledge. You actually have to think about that knowledge. But thinking it's not a really easy thing to do. I mean, we're not biologically predisposed to think deeply. So we have to turn on that level of thinking. And I always ask, "Well, how do we get kids to do that?"

[00:31:11] Hugh Catts: Well, we can't tell 'em, "think more deeply," right? You're a third grade teacher. Can you imagine telling your students, "Alright, now what I want you to do is think more deeply about what you just read." Right? Right? So, how do we do it? Well, we give them ways to think more deeply about it. So we ask them, you know, "What's the main idea in that? Can you paraphrase what that chapter said? Can you think back to what you read earlier and think what that particular sentence means in terms of that, you know, make an inference based upon something earlier." 

[00:31:43] Reid Smith: I'd just point to making sure that you really give students the opportunity to learn more about the world that they're in and the cultures that we have in the past, present, and future.

[00:31:52] Reid Smith: They're all really important things for our kids. And probably the other aspect would just be the importance of monitoring students' understanding as they read that, given our discussions today about the misconceptions that they might hold that exist both in the knowledge that they bring to the act of reading, but also during the act of reading itself.

[00:32:10] Reid Smith: And you can see that if you're reading a fiction book and students have mixed up two of the characters because they have similar names that start the same letter and all of a sudden the text makes no sense at all. So just that, that importance of just monitoring the comprehension of kids and what they think the text is saying at any particular point is something that's really valuable and worth your time.

[00:32:33] Sharon Vaughn: I wanna thank the listeners because I feel like I preach to the already converted. So anyone listening to your show already probably knows many of the things firsthand that we talked about, and sometimes they just look for affirmation. And so I hope some of the things that we have said today provides the kind of affirmation your very capable listening group already knows.

[00:32:58] Susan Lambert: I think some really great next steps is to take, first of all, this idea that comprehension is not a skill. Think about the instruction that you deliver to your students and how you're actually framing comprehension. Are you thinking about it as a skill? Because I think if you just change your mindset around what it is, it may subtly change your instruction.

[00:33:21] Susan Lambert: Number two, think about the texts that you're selecting and the kind of questions that you're asking. Go back and review and think about the kind of questions that you're asking considering the text that you're using. And I would also say, if you can't ask those rich and deep questions about a text, the text you're using may not be the right text.

[00:33:41] Susan Lambert: So think about those things together. And then the last takeaway is, what background knowledge are your students going to have to have to engage in that text appropriately? And if you have to build that background knowledge, you need to make sure you do that or help your students do that. And then I guess an extension of that is build the background knowledge for kids. That's really important.

[00:34:07] Susan Lambert: Finally, just a reminder that your students are working really hard and it's so important to understand what they're getting right and what they need support with. And don't forget to check out our listening guide for even more suggested next steps. So this, as I said before, at the beginning, maybe I've said it five times, I don't know, this Essentials episode does not answer everything about comprehension. What we're doing here is building a foundation, understanding that comprehension isn't a skill, it's complex. There are factors that influence comprehension. We've talked already about in this episode about text. The text itself, the questions we ask, the kind of background knowledge students come to when they come to a particular text.

[00:34:56] Susan Lambert: But there are many, many more things that influence comprehension, and because of that, we're going to spend an entire season unpacking those factors that influence both the comprehension process; what happens while we're reading, and the comprehension product; what happens as a result of when we've read.

[00:35:20] Susan Lambert: We'll also delve into assessing comprehension, including an exploration of how students are comprehending. This is something that will enable us to build on their strengths because remember, comprehension isn't a single score or a "you got it" or "you didn't get it." There are multiple factors that readers bring into the comprehension process.

[00:35:44] Susan Lambert: I am super excited about this because we've spent a lot of time talking about word recognition, and in the Science of Reading community, we know comprehension is the ultimate goal, and so we're gonna really dive into all of those factors. That's what's coming up on Season 10, launching this September.

[00:36:05] Susan Lambert: Thank you for listening to the second edition of Science of Reading Essentials. Remember to visit our new resource site amplify.com/soressentials. There you'll find lots of free resources, including our brand new listening guide for Science of Reading Essentials Comprehension. That guide summarizes the key insights from this episode, recommends some resources to take your learning to the next level, and shares strategies for bringing these ideas directly into the classroom.

[00:36:41] Susan Lambert: That listening guide will also include links to my full conversations with each of the researchers you heard on today's episode. Again, you can find that and other great resources on our new page,  amplify.com/soressentials. That's where you'll also find Science of Reading Essentials Writing. We'll be back with more of these special episodes in the coming months, diving into other key literacy topics. These episodes are a lot of fun and work to put together. I'd really appreciate it if you'd share them with a couple of friends and colleagues. Next time around, we're going to dive deeper into one of the very topics that Dr. Vaughn raised today, leveled reading.

[00:37:31] Susan Lambert: Coming up, Dr. Tim Shanahan returns to the podcast to discuss his new book, Leveled Reading, Leveled Lives: How Students Reading Achievement Has Been Held Back and What We Can Do About It. 

[00:37:43] Tim Shanahan: This notion of trying to match kids to books and get everybody to their right level is at the very least wasteful.

[00:37:51] Tim Shanahan: It's not, you know, benefiting kids. So we're spending an awful lot of time doing a lot of work that is not only not paying off, but it's probably holding a lot of kids back. 

[00:38:01] Susan Lambert: That's next time. Science of Reading: The podcast is brought to you by Amplify. I'm Susan Lambert. Thank you so much for listening.