Fordham Brief Calls for an End to Reading Comprehension Instruction

While it provides a useful primer on flaws in the standard approach, it overlooks a role for strategy instruction

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A policy brief from the Fordham Institute calls for an end to the practice of teaching reading comprehension. While it breaks no new ground, the brief provides a useful summary of research on the key role of knowledge as opposed to abstract skills, along with recommendations for change.

If you’re familiar with the ongoing discussion on flaws in reading comprehension instruction, the new brief—titled “Think Again: Should Elementary Schools Teach Reading Comprehension?” and released today—might strike you as old news. And if you know that Fordham has long advocated for content-rich curriculum, you might wonder why they’ve undertaken this project now. Haven’t they already said this? And if not, why not?

But if you’re not familiar with critiques of skills-focused comprehension instruction, or you know someone who isn’t, the Fordham brief provides a handy compendium of the research supporting a knowledge-building approach. Standard comprehension instruction focuses on skills like “finding the main idea” of a text, or “making inferences,” to be practiced using books at each student’s individual reading level.

The brief, written by Daniel Buck, argues that “once students have learned to decode, reading books and other texts of any purported ‘level’ with understanding depends more on knowledge than skills.” Furthermore, that knowledge should be built through “explicit, carefully sequenced and paced, teacher-directed instruction across multiple subjects, including but not limited to social studies, science, and literature.”

The brief notes that the report of the National Reading Panel, released in 2000—which has become something of a bible for science-of-reading advocates, at least in the form of a simplified infographic representing the “five pillars of early literacy”—has a lot to do with the problem. While the panel’s conclusions on foundational reading skills like phonics are solid, “the section of the report that dealt with reading comprehension was only partly right and led to dubious practices,” according to the brief.

Putting the Imprimatur of Science on a Flawed Approach

It would be more accurate to say the NRP report exacerbated a pre-existing problem. Schools had long been teaching reading comprehension as though it were a set of abstract skills, and some had already embraced the metacognitive strategies the report endorsed (e.g., asking yourself questions as you’re reading).

But the NRP report seemed to put the imprimatur of science on strategy instruction as the solution to reading comprehension problems, with no mention of the need to build students’ knowledge. At the time, there was already plenty of evidence that readers who had prior knowledge relating to the topic of a text had an easier time comprehending it. The report, however, barely mentioned that evidence—even though the strategies it endorsed all rely on some level of prior knowledge.

As the brief acknowledges, there are indeed many studies demonstrating that some kinds of comprehension strategy instruction are effective. But, as the brief also points out, those studies also show that students get all the benefits of strategy instruction after just a few sessions.

After reviewing 12 meta-analyses, cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham noted that “there was no evidence that increasing instructional time for comprehension strategies—even by 400 percent!—brought any benefit.” And yet the typical student gets many hundreds of hours of comprehension instruction in elementary and middle school—time that crowds out potentially knowledge-building instruction in subjects like history and science.

The brief also notes the lack of evidence behind the widespread practice of leveled reading and casts doubt on the emphasis on giving students free choice—as long as they choose a book at their supposed level. The theory is that choice will lead to motivation and that motivation will lead to achievement.

But there are other ways to motivate students than by giving them total freedom in choosing topics to read about. And they’re unlikely to choose a topic they know nothing about, even though they might become very interested in that topic if first introduced to it by a teacher. As for the link between motivation and achievement, the evidence suggests that achievement actually leads to motivation, not vice versa—or at least that it’s a reciprocal process.

Understating and Overstating the Problem

If anything, the brief understates the comprehension-instruction problem by framing it as a feature of the “reading workshop model.” While that model, often identified with “balanced literacy,” does indeed foreground comprehension skills over knowledge-building, the same is true for the reading programs, or basal readers, that are generally seen as being quite different. Some basals take a more systematic approach to foundational skills like phonics than the workshop model, but when it comes to comprehension instruction, both models are equally flawed.

At the same time, the brief seems to offer no role at all for comprehension skill or strategy instruction. That could provide fodder for the misconception that teachers need to choose between that kind of instruction and knowledge-building. Rather, it’s a question of what they put in the foreground.

The standard approach is to teach a “skill of the week”—for example, comparing and contrasting—using a text chosen not for its content but because it seems to lend itself to teaching the skill. A knowledge-building approach would focus on a text or topic and bring in whatever skills students might need to understand it. If you’re teaching about Athens and Sparta, for example, it would make perfect sense to ask students to “compare and contrast” the two city-states.

A Few Omissions and Caveats

There are other minor omissions I could highlight, but of course it’s a “brief,” not an encyclopedia; you can’t include everything. I do, however, wish the brief had touched on the role of syntax in reading comprehension, which is too often overlooked. Written language uses more complex sentence structure than spoken language, and if students aren’t familiar with it they can be stymied—even if they have good decoding skills and adequate background knowledge.

I would also have loved to see a mention of the relationship between writing and reading comprehension—particularly the fact that teaching students how to use complex syntax in their own writing can enable them to understand it when they’re reading.

The brief concludes with four generally sensible recommendations, pointing in the direction of content-specific state literacy standards; state-mandated literacy curricula that build knowledge in addition to covering phonics; state tests that incentivize content-focused instruction; and teacher-prep programs that emphasize the importance of building knowledge.

I’d just add two caveats to those recommendations. First, it can be tricky for states and districts to identify curricula that truly build knowledge as opposed to being merely labeled knowledge-building. While the brief recommends the Knowledge Matters Campaign as a resource for finding such curricula, it fails to mention that EdReports—the go-to resource for many curriculum decision-makers—has become increasingly unreliable.

And while it would make sense for states to embed their reading tests in “essential content,” as the brief recommends, teachers won’t be incentivized to cover the topics on the tests unless they know what they are in advance. Perhaps that’s what the brief anticipates, but it’s not stated explicitly. One possibility is to ground the reading passages in topics covered in the state’s social studies and science standards. At least one state, Texas, is planning to go that route.

All in all, though, the Fordham brief can provide a useful starting point for the many states, districts, and schools still using an approach to comprehension that conflicts with the evidence. If they don’t heed its warnings, they’re likely to find that just “fixing phonics” isn’t a solution to generally low reading scores, especially at higher grade levels, or to the significant gaps in outcomes between students who are able to acquire academic knowledge outside school and the many students who are not.

Update, 7.17.24: The original title of this post was “A Call for an End to Reading Comprehension Instruction.” It has been changed to clarify that the “call” to end reading comprehension instruction refers to the Fordham Institute brief rather than this post itself.