from Marshall Memo 1022
Timothy Shanahan on Reading Comprehension Versus Learning
In this online article, Timothy Shanahan (University of Illinois/Chicago) distinguishes between reading comprehension and learning from a text. “It’s an important distinction if we seek to teach reading effectively,” he says. Here are his thoughts on each:
• Comprehension – This is basically grasping the meaning and meaningfulness of what’s read, which is important to getting it into memory. Some see teaching comprehension as mostly for the elementary grades. Before the current emphasis on reading strategies, comprehension instruction was often about having students practice answering questions about passages. The increasing emphasis on teaching reading strategies was supposed to make students active readers, applying their metacognition, practicing discrete skills (main idea, inferencing) being aware of whether they were understanding, and being able to apply the skills to new texts.
• Learning – Advocates of knowledge acquisition disagree with the content-agnostic approach of reading strategy instruction – the idea that it doesn’t matter what students read because they can apply the strategies they learn to any text. Learning advocates emphasize the importance of high-quality texts and reading several on a topic to deepen learning. They suggest using more-effective reading strategies than answering questions or highlighting text – for example, asking yourself questions about what you’ve read and summarizing a text in your own words.
“Certainly,” says Shanahan, “the knowledge crew is right about the importance of books worth reading. This means science and social studies texts. But it also means reading worthwhile literature (cultural touchstones), and fiction that conveys important things about the human condition (our relationships, our motivations, and so on)… Strategy advocates like these ideas, but strategy instruction can get pretty procedural, without much attention to the content.”
However, says Shanahan, neither approach is paying enough attention to teaching students how to comprehend. One stresses reading skills, the other knowledge acquisition. So what are reading teachers supposed to do? Shanahan has these suggestions:
• In directed or guided reading lessons (where students read a text with the guidance and supervision of a teacher) focus on reading valuable texts from which we want students to gain important content knowledge.
• Ensure that these texts are challenging. “If kids can comprehend the text on their own,” says Shanahan, “then it is not the right text for a reading lesson.” A major goal in teacher-directed reading lessons is helping students “negotiate the difficulties of a text.”
• Building deep knowledge requires more than just reading and answering questions. Students should read more than one text on a subject, take part in discussions, presentations, and debates, and write reports, critiques, comparisons, and analyses.
• Those who advocate teaching comprehension strategies “should get serious about what constitutes comprehension strategy,” says Shanahan. One truly important skill is self-monitoring – being aware of when our eyeballs are reading but we’re not understanding. “Surprisingly, many students, even college-age students, read with little understanding and do nothing about it,” he says. We need to teach students what to do when they don’t understand a word, when a sentence doesn’t make sense, when they get confused about which character or concept is being talked about. Students need to be taught how to solve these problems on their own and develop the tenacity to persist when they are confused. And, adds Shanahan, don’t allow the study strategies to distract from the content that’s being learned.
Shanahan concludes with a comment on the commonly used study skill of highlighting text. Researchers have found that this is an ineffective strategy. Why? Because many students don’t have enough understanding of the text to know what’s important, and end up highlighting almost everything. A better approach: provide important background knowledge and teach students an important reading strategy: how to use titles, subheadings, boldfacing, graphics, and other clues authors use to structure meaning.
“I Want My Students to Comprehend; Am I Teaching the Wrong Kind of Strategies?” by Timothy Shanahan in Shanahan on Literacy, February 3, 2024;
