In the simplest terms, comprehension refers to understanding the text that is read. Yet it is a highly complex skill. As the RAND Reading Study Group (2002) points out, comprehension should be understood as “the process of simultaneously extracting and constructing meaning through interaction and involvement with written language.” This process, the RAND group continues, “entails three elements: The reader who is doing the comprehending, the text that is to be comprehended, and the activity in which comprehension is a part.” Snow and Sweet (2003) note that comprehension requires a number of capacities and abilities, including “attention, memory, critical analytical ability, inferencing, and visualization,” along with motivation (or a purpose for reading), interest in the content being read, and a “sense of self-efficacy as a reader” (Snow and Sweet 2003).

Again, it is important to stress the interconnectedness of reading skills: Comprehension will not develop until a child has acquired reasonable fluency (RAND 2002). Moreover, comprehension can be enhanced through a number of strategies, including focusing on vocabulary growth (Snow and Sweet 2003). As with most reading skills, comprehension also takes practice, either by reading independently, by reading in pairs or groups, or by being read aloud to.

CIERA (2003) summarizes six effective comprehension strategies identified by the National Reading Panel:

• Monitor comprehension: Teachers can help students become monitors of their own comprehension, so that they are aware of what they do understand, identify what they do not understand, and reread or ask questions to resolve any problems they have comprehending the text.
• Use graphic and semantic organizers: Graphic organizers illustrate concepts and interrelationships among concepts in a text, using diagrams or other pictorial devices. Graphic organizers are known by different names, such as maps, webs, graphs, charts, frames, or clusters. Semantic organizers (also called semantic maps or semantic webs) are graphic organizers that look somewhat like a spider web. In a semantic organizer, lines connect a central concept to a variety of related ideas and events. One type of graphic organizer that works well with students from first grade through middle school is the KWL Chart, which involves making three lists. Before reading a book, the teacher asks students to list what they already know (K) about the subject and what they want to learn (W) from reading; after reading, the students list what they have learned (L).
• Answer questions: Oral or written questions can give students an explicit purpose for reading, help focus their reading, and encourage them to think actively and monitor their comprehension as they read.
• Generate questions: Teaching students to ask their own questions as they read improves their active processing and understanding of text. Such questions— another form of monitoring comprehension—may help students recognize whether they understand what they are reading.
• Recognize story structure: Once students have an understanding of the content of a story (setting, initiating events, internal reactions, goals, attempts, and outcomes) and its organization, they have a greater appreciation, understanding, and memory of the stories they read.
• Summarize: Creating a summary forces students to determine the important ideas in what they read and find ways to condense the information and put it into their own words.

Recommendations for effective instruction: Research shows that these strategies work best when teachers provide explicit instruction to students, telling them why and when they should use strategies, what strategies to use, and how to apply them (CIERA 2003).

Several additional strategies for enhancing comprehension were identified by the Alabama Reading Initiative (Salinger and Bacevich 2006):

• Think-alouds—voicing out loud theories about the text; for example, as a teacher reads, she might say, “I wonder why the main character did that ….”
• Cooperative learning or working in teams to encourage discussion and shared construction of meaning.
• Fluency checks, in the form of a one-minute oral reading, with the expectation that fluency is correlated with comprehension.

For more on reading see: Main article on research, fluency, phonics, vocabulary, phonemic awareness, NAEP achievement levels, and recent research on early reading