What is Important to Know About Reading Comprehension?

Comprehension strategies are conscious plans or sets of steps that good readers use to make sense of text. Comprehension strategy instruction helps students become purposeful, active readers who are in control of their own reading comprehension. The seven strategies appear to have a firm scientific basis for improving text comprehension.


There are seven important strategies that all readers must be able to apply to text in order to read and understand content. Students explore comprehension using a range of strategies that include monitoring for meaning, asking questions while reading, making inferences, determining importance, synthesizing ideas, visualizing information, making connections between texts, the world, and their lives and using sensory and emotional images.


In the last several years, more and more educators have been paying attention to comprehension instruction in the elementary grades. Teachers know that the ultimate goal of reading is to make sense of a variety of texts. Emphasizing only decoding in the early grades can lead to students parroting back text by the third and fourth grades with little understanding. Teachers also know the limitations of emphasizing phonics instruction without meaningful literacy contexts.