Intervention focus should be on a limited number of strategies that are intentional mental actions during reading that improve reading comprehension. They are deliberate efforts by a reader to better understand or remember what is being read and build knowledge. Teach students to question, visualize, monitor/clarify, infer, and summarize.
What is Reading Comprehension?
Reading comprehension is an outcome. Comprehension occurs when a student can read words accurately and fluently, understand the meaning of the words, have adequate background knowledge, and focus on critical content (Archer, 2020). Thus, comprehension is a series of language and cognitive processes engaged by readers to build meaning from a text. Extracting meaning from text is essential to students’ achieving literacy goals and learning content in other subject areas.
[Reading comprehension] is the orchestrated product of a set of linguistic and cognitive processes operating on text and interacting with background knowledge, features of a text, and the purpose and goals of the reading situation.
Who Needs Additional Instructional Support in Comprehension?
Students in grades 2 or above who are accurate and fluent readers but cannot understand grade-level text may require explicit comprehension instruction. However, before focusing intervention efforts on comprehension, it is critical to ascertain if students first need additional instruction in phonics, fluency, vocabulary, sentence structure, and text structure. Comprehension intervention on specific reading strategies cannot compensate for limited background knowledge or significant word reading, fluency, vocabulary, and syntax difficulties.
Explicit Instruction in Comprehension
Students with automatic word recognition skills and adequate language comprehension abilities who are still reading below grade level may require more teaching on a limited number of strategies. Watch the video and read below to learn how to improve comprehension through intentional instruction in mental actions that help students fully understand the text.
Preparing to Implement the Intervention
Select grade-level, rigorous texts aligned with Tier 1 instruction in topic or theme. These can be texts students see in the core instruction with their peers or text sets that build to a target text used in the classroom. After selecting the text(s), plan before-, during-, and after-reading activities, including text-dependent questions, guided by students’ needs and strengths. Decide how to explicitly model comprehension strategies to help students understand and learn from the text.
How to Teach:
Use Multiple Texts on a Topic
Use Multiple Strategies
Read, Write, and Discuss
Refrain from teaching reading strategies through disconnected, leveled texts. Instead, align text in intervention with core instruction topics. Be sure to use multiple texts, including videos, infographics, images, etc., as part of text sets that build to the most complex/target texts.
Strategy instruction is most effective when multiple strategies are taught together rather than one at a time. Model and then practice applying strategies to unpack the text's meaning, keeping the text (not the strategies) at the center of the lesson.
Plan discussions and writing activities focused on the grade-level complex text. Use graphic organizers to help students organize their thoughts for writing and discussions.
Intervention Flags
When designing an intervention plan, it’s important to consider characteristics of effective instruction. The green flags and red flags can also be used to evaluate intervention programs. Click the arrow to view the attributes of effective and ineffective instruction. Click on the hotspots below to read more.
Frequently Asked Questions
Resources for Explicit Intervention in Comprehension
Free text sets available on a range of topics to build background knowledge and vocabulary. Includes a 10-minute routine.
Student Achievement Partners outlines before, during, and after reading strategies to ensure student success with grade-level-appropriate texts.
Student Achievement Partners outlines the do's and don'ts of boosting reading comprehension abilities.
Louisa Moats and Nancy Hennessy created a framework for planning to teach a text. You can use this framework to help you plan your comprehension lessons.
Additional Learning Opportunities
Complete a short course on K-5 Comprehension Instruction.
Watch Equity Through Rigorous Texts for All Students presented by Ohio’s Literacy leads.
Listen to Designing a Blueprint for Reading Comprehension Instruction with Nancy Hennessy.