Why Reading Comprehension is Tough to Teach

Nearly a half century ago, a landmark study showed that teachers weren’t explicitly teaching reading comprehension. Once children learned how to read words, no one taught them how to make sense of the sentences and paragraphs. Some kids naturally got it, and some didn’t. Since then, reading researchers have come up with many ideas to foster comprehension. Educators continue to debate how much to emphasize some ideas over others.

Although the research on reading comprehension continues, there’s relatively good evidence for a collection of teaching approaches, from building vocabulary and background knowledge to leading classroom discussions and encouraging children to check for understanding as they read. That should mean substantial progress toward fixing a problem identified decades ago. But a paper published in a 2025 issue of the peer-reviewed journal Scientific Studies of Reading shows that hardly any of these evidence-based practices have filtered into the classroom.

“It’s a little bit discouraging,” said Philip Capin, an assistant professor of education at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education. “There’s debates going on about strategies versus knowledge. But what we often see in classrooms is actually devoid of high-quality strategy instruction or knowledge-building instruction.” Capin is referring to a host of comprehension strategies, such as checking yourself for understanding after reading a paragraph, identifying the author’s main point or summarizing what you have just read. Knowledge building, by contrast, is helpful because it’s easier to comprehend something you are reading if you can connect it to something you already know.

Teachers spend limited time reading texts with children. “The obvious problem is that it’s hard to support reading comprehension if students are not reading,” said Capin. The dearth of reading was especially pronounced in science classes where teachers tended to prefer PowerPoint slides over texts. More time was spent on reading comprehension instruction in reading or English class, but it was still just 23 percent of instructional time. Still, that is a big improvement over the original 1978 study, which documented that only 1 percent of instructional time was spent on reading comprehension.

A separate survey of middle school teachers published in 2021 echoes these observational findings that very little reading is taking place in classrooms. Seventy percent of science teachers said they spent less than 6 minutes on texts a day, or less than 30 minutes a week. Only 50 percent of social studies teachers said they spent more time reading in classrooms. “It’s possible that poor reading instruction may beget poor reading instruction,” said Capin. “Teachers frequently report that their students have difficulties reading grade-level texts.” So they avoid reading altogether. It can seem like a catch-22. Teachers don’t devote more time to reading instruction because students have difficulty reading. But without more time reading, students cannot improve.

Capin said his team found that reading instruction was more focused on word reading skills, what educators call “decoding.” Researchers noticed that teachers were also building students’ knowledge, especially in science and social studies classes. But this knowledge building was mostly divorced from engaging students in text comprehension. “We took this approach that reading comprehension instruction is defined by reading and understanding text,” said Capin. That might sound obvious, but Capin said that some advocates of knowledge building criticized his analysis, arguing that knowledge building alone is beneficial for reading comprehension and it doesn’t matter if the teacher uses slides or actual texts.

Interest in the science of reading has been exploding around the country over the past five years. Hopefully, we won’t have to wait another 50 years for comprehension to get better.

Allison Green
Boston Tutoring Services