4 Common Misunderstandings about Comprehension

February 9, 2025

How often do you feel like your students struggle with understanding what they read? At the end of last year, we conducted a survey with teachers in our community, and over 60% shared that comprehension was their students’ greatest challenge.

Reflecting on my teaching practices and delving into research, I realised there are several misunderstandings about comprehension—what it is and how it should be taught. These beliefs influenced my development of an online literacy program committed to improving literacy instruction through evidence-based strategies.

Let’s take a look at some strategies to kickstart the new year with fresh ideas to teach comprehension.

Misunderstanding 1: Comprehension can be taught in isolation

Comprehension relies on a number of interconnected factors:

a) Strong decoding skills: If students can’t read the words on a page, how can they understand the text?

b) Solid vocabulary: Research suggests that students need to know 90 to 95% of the words in a text — not just recognise them but have a strong understanding of them.

c) Background knowledge to connect new information to what they already know. (Dr Marilyn Adams developed the analogy “mental Velcro“. It’s the idea that background knowledge serves as mental Velcro. If we have a little bit of background knowledge about what we’re reading, we can take the new information and attach it to this mental Velcro that we have in the “filing cabinet” inside our brains. This ultimately helps students anchor new ideas and build true understanding.)

Teaching comprehension in isolation — like focusing on making a summary or identifying the main idea — ignores these critical elements. Instead, we should ask:

What background knowledge might students lack?
What vocabulary could confuse them?
Which sentence structures might pose challenges?

This broader perspective helps students become competent readers capable of true comprehension.

Misunderstanding 2: Comprehension is a skill

Comprehension is an outcome — the ultimate goal of reading instruction. It represents what we want students to achieve every time they engage with a text. Comprehension isn’t an isolated strand we can teach on its own. It’s the result of students mastering both language comprehension and word recognition and applying them in harmony. Shifting our perspective from teaching comprehension as a skill to building the components that lead to comprehension can transform our literacy instruction.

Misunderstanding 3: Comprehension skills and strategies should be the main focus

This might surprise you, but as we increasingly align our teaching practices with the science of reading, it becomes clear that focusing on a single strategy for an entire week may not be the most effective approach. While skills are important, we should try to look at the bigger picture of literacy instruction: our students come to school to acquire knowledge and to build knowledge. And we can combine these with comprehension strategies. Research shows that students with a strong foundation in background knowledge and a robust vocabulary are far better equipped to understand complex texts than those who rely solely on strategies. When students have knowledge about a topic and the vocabulary to match, comprehension becomes much easier.

Misunderstanding 4: Answering questions is enough to gauge comprehension

Comprehension is incredibly complex, which makes it really hard to assess. This is tricky as we rely on multiple choice tests to measure student understanding.

I recommend using a variety of assessment methods, as well as put structures and opportunities in place, that allow us to continuously get snapshots of our students’ understanding. This might include open ended questions or written responses, or have our students explain why they selected a specific answer. If you are going to do multiple choice, have your students explain, why they chose “Option A”, or even have a conversation with them.

Even consider having students do projects or creative tasks that allow them to demonstrate their comprehension and understanding in other ways. The more diverse your approach to assessment, the clearer picture you can get of your students’ true abilities.

As mentioned earlier, comprehension is influenced by so many elements—background knowledge, vocabulary, syntax, and more. Remember, comprehension is complex. It’s not straightforward or clear-cut. However, when we shift our mindset and approach, we can help our students grow into skilled, competent readers.