Common Misconceptions about Reading Comprehension
Knowledge Matters
“Across the nation, few students reach literacy levels that enable them to develop interpretations, think critically about texts, make evidence-based arguments, or assemble information from multiple texts into a coherent understanding of a topic. …We believe that one fundamental reason students are not making progress in gaining advanced levels of literacy is that they have very little opportunity and support to use texts for purposeful learning in the subject areas, and thereby to gain needed dispositions, strategies, and skills” (Greenleaf and Valencia, 2017).
Critical readers will no doubt notice an absent citation in parens following a claim asserted rather brashly in some circles with the qualifier “across the nation.” Other, less broadbrushed terminology was available. ‘We have learned from presentations at academic conferences that…’ or ‘After an exhaustive search for credible evidence supporting the argument that students CAN do these things without success, we reluctantly conclude that they cannot….’ Good try but no cigar. Absence of evidence for a position is not evidence for its obverse. There’s a smidgen of a tension between saying students can’t “make evidence-based arguments” and two authors claiming we have massive educational failure vertically and horizontally—without a sterling citation.
If you read the article, which I downloaded from ResearchGate, you’ll be convinced that the phrase “we believe” is an important signal, indicating to the reader that the strength of the stated claims in the reader’s mind depends on the reader’s judgment of the authors’ credibility, expertise, and research authority. To comprehend this article, one must understand the background experiences of the researchers and think about their authenticity. I encourage you to visit the urls in the next paragraph and get a sense of these researchers willing to put their personal and professional wisdom and knowledge on the line and open with an indictment of the educational system “across the nation.” If you do read the article, the authors discuss their experiences and published studies that DO go in parens.
Cynthia Greenleaf and Sheila Valencia have considerable authority to speak about this topic. Since the 1980s, they have been in and out of schools and classrooms studying reading and learning in subject areas in high schools as individual researchers. Professors Emerita now, they collaborated to write “Missing in Action: Learning from Texts in Subject-Matter Classrooms” together in 2017. Note that the enactment of knowledge-building-with-text instructional plans in traditional high school disciplines has not changed in any fundamental way since the 1980s. Few students have opportunities to learn purposefully by “develop[ing] interpretations, think[ing] critically about texts, mak[ing] evidence-based arguments, or assembl[ing] information from multiple texts into a coherent understanding of a topic.”
The term “purposeful” is ambiguous, silent on a key question: Whose purpose? The article probes this ambiguity specifically and powerfully. Greenleaf and Valencia (2017) discuss their experiences as researchers investigating inquiry-based, project-based, and problem-based models of pedagogy as promising platforms for supporting the role of comprehension as a tool in higher-order literacy performance with students developing an intrinsic interest in searching for and building subjective knowledge. What they discuss in this paper about the dynamics of typical subject area reading assignments squares with the reality of high school literacy as I witnessed it during two decades of teaching secondary school reading instruction in teacher preparation. The norm requires students to read in order to satisfy a purpose set by the teacher. The assumption is that teachers hold all the epistemological cards in the game. By high school many students have figured out they don’t want to play.
In the mid-1990s Greenleaf worked with a high school faculty teaching a high-poverty, diverse population of students to collaboratively develop and study interdisciplinary project-based curricula. For example, a ninth grade unit situated students in a context of trying to decide the best method of producing energy. Activities included discussion-based pedagogies, small group work, and frequent opportunities for speaking and writing—and a wide variety of texts. Here’s what happened:
“…[V]ery few students recognized or reported that reading was difficult. They didn't connect understanding with reading. Students were compliant note takers, copying verbatim from slides, but they were confused about what to note from lectures or videos. One student told us, 'I just pretty much write down what I thought was important … which was kind of difficult … because what I think is important may not be what [the teacher] thinks is important.’ All-in-all, we found that text played a limited role in students' learning” (p.3).
Inside an inquiry-based or problem-based unit, students who develop particular interests, who come upon ideas and information from readings serendipitously to use in developing their own interpretation inherit the task of assigning importance to ideas rather than identifying information they believe the teacher finds important. In a classroom environment with distributed tasks, individual and group agency, and divergent thinking going on, epistemology does not mean building knowledge identical to every other student in the class in conformance with a teacher’s specifications. Epistemology means building one’s own knowledge fund and contributing to the community task.
In 2010 Valencia found herself in a similar situation. Her research focused on studying literacy contexts in high school classrooms in search of ways to collaborate with teachers to design strategies to help students learn from texts. Note the reversal of the norm. Instead of importing a canned strategy with a trainer or guru, the idea is to understand the reality first and then support teachers in changing practice according to their situation. From 2010-2012, her project used aclassroom observations, videotaped lessons, and interviews to study teachers in six schools across two states. Guess what:
“Shockingly, we found that the majority of students (>70%) rarely read the course textbook although teachers frequently assigned it for homework. They didn’t need to read it to get a good grade because teachers delivered the same information in class. As one student told us, ‘…the information we get from all the Powerpoint [lectures] that he gives us is pretty much what we would read in the book …we sort of read the textbook through him” (p.7).
Both Greenleaf and Valencia provide expert testimony helpful in piecing together a complaint about the norm of passive reading embedded like a spike in a railroad track in secondary school. A bedrock principle of content area reading instruction as I taught it states that how teachers use their power of evaluation intrudes on how students think about the text while they read. Multiple choice as a daily diet leads to cognitive acquiescence, slaves in a diamond mine. Complicating this situation, teachers freely acknowledge that few students actually read their assignments. As a workaround many teachers resort to lectures to get the requisite knowledge in the heads of students. It’s all about official knowledge.
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The picture that emerges about reading comprehension in high school from the research of two lifetimes (Greenleaf and Valencia, 2017) derives from and continues to feed fundamental misconceptions about reading in relation to knowledge. In the 1990s Michael Apple published "Official Knowledge: Democratic Education in a Conservative Age" (1993), exploring the relationship between power, knowledge, and education and how certain forms of knowledge become "official" and legitimate while others are excluded.
Clearly, gaining knowledge of a topic simply out of student interest and passion may be tolerated but not rewarded with a grade or academic credit. According to Apple, selection and organization of knowledge in schools are not neutral processes but shaped by political, economic, and cultural interests of society. Apple revoices the sociology of education in the 1970s through figures like Ivan Illich (the hidden curriculum) and Paulo Freire (pedagogy of the oppressed): Schools reproduce cultural, economic, and social inequalities of society. Through the hidden curriculum and the differential distribution of knowledge and skills, schools contribute to the maintenance of the status quo and the perpetuation of social stratification.
The chain of command when it comes to sanctioned textbooks and topics in high schools begins with universities, state departments of education, and testing companies. Comprehension of text can be reduced to the act of summarizing wherein content as sanctioned by the teacher as an agent of the State becomes the highest level of performance. Opening the boundaries of comprehension to acts of self-selection of text, reading across a collection of texts for a self-determined purpose, the sorts of advanced guided experiences Greenleaf and Valencia (2017) say are missing in action are unusual to say the least. Opening the boundaries in 2024 lets the bot into the classroom.
Michel Foucault, the French philosopher, introduced the concept “episteme” in his book "The Order of Things" (1966) to refer to all of the unconscious rules, structures, and limits defining the boundaries of knowledge in a particular historical period. The force of the surrounding episteme shapes what is judged valid knowledge and how this knowledge is organized and understood. Operating at an unconscious level, the episteme colors the way people think, speak, and perceive reality.
No one person nor group deliberately creates an episteme; it develops in a struggle for power. Foucault saw discontinuity between epistemes, arguing that there are ruptures in the way knowledge is organized and understood from one period to another. These breaks are consequences of seismic shifts in the conditions of knowledge construction among the powerful. Foucault's episteme challenges the idea of objective, universal truth and illuminates historical and cultural relativity of knowledge. Post rupture, taken-for-granted assumptions and categories structuring our understanding of the world are restructured for good or bad. A President of the United States can be a convicted felon. An abortion is not healthcare but murder.
So what misconceptions about reading comprehension am I noticing today in our episteme? Keep in mind this list is my own, a product of my research, my experience, and remember that misconceptions can be partly true but largely false. I am in complete agreement with Greenleaf and Valencia (2017) in terms of the scope of the instructional problem reaching “across the nation.”
Misconception 1: Prior knowledge is essential for reading comprehension.
This is almost a platitude that shuts down critical pedagogical thinking. Depends. One must know the language, the script, prior to reading—central in importance for second-language learners. Functional knowledge of academic vocabulary is obligatory. But in the context of inquiry-based or problem-based pedagogy, students’ purposes for reading are to learn new knowledge useful in furthering inquiry or solving the problem and to look at it in light of prior understanding. Clarifying subjective prior knowledge before engaging in making new knowledge is important for students’ setting individual purposes for text-selection and for reading comprehension.
Uses of AI as tools to get learners ready to engage a complex text for epistemological purposes seem promising. Managing my prior knowledge during and after reading in light of new knowledge, exploring it, monitoring the impact of my own lack of knowledge on the reading, searching for and implementing fix-up strategies—successful comprehension of a collection of single unified text depends upon how a reader uses a variety of strategies and resources based on self-awareness and purpose. Metacognitive Chats with AI along these lines could be worth exploring. Placing a single unified text in a set of texts increases demands on interpretation, assessing credibility, synthesizing, criticizing, and related advanced skills.
Misconception 2: Reading is the dominant method for acquiring knowledge in high school.
As Greenleaf and Valencia (2017) pointed out, teachers often make reading assignments fully expecting students not to read them, sometimes expressing frustration about lack of compliance, often using workarounds to get the information out. Many college students have told me over the years they never bought a textbook during their undergraduate years and rarely cracked one open even in high school. Reading is not the dominant method. Opportunities for inquiry or problem-solving or becoming a “text actor” (Cervetti & Pearson, 20231) are scarce given the institutional infrastructure which insists that every student learn the same objective knowledge.
Misconception 3: A reader’s purpose has little to do with comprehension; the teacher’s purpose guides the reader.
Reading a text to learn its contents for an examination can interfere with reading a text for comprehension in the sense of integrating text information with prior knowledge. In the test condition, the student is focused on identifying and remembering information regardless of comprehension. Epistemology is a matter of ingesting the episteme, of replicating the facts of the text in a mental structure like buttons on a shirt. Reading a text to learn requires varying degrees of comprehension and critique, depending on the reader’s purpose, a situation which can’t occur when the teacher’s purpose dominates.
Misconception 4: Preteaching vocabulary improves reading comprehension.
Yes and no. Preteaching vocabulary can be the flip side of lecturing. Often, academic texts are written to provide a nuanced view of a concept, and part of the work of the reader is learning to learn vocabulary in literacy textlets where the intent is to learn vocabulary along with concepts in one swell foop. It is properly the reader’s work to explore and examine nuances in the text as a way to learn vocabulary from the text. Early in my experience teaching middle school, I discovered that students often interpreted boldfaced words as the signal to “skip.” The teacher may have already explained the meaning or, if the word is important, the teacher will use it in lecture.
How do you define reading comprehension? There was a time before the comprehension renaissance of the 1970s and 1980s when psycholinguists talked about reading without the added word “comprehension.” Reading meant comprehension. Nowadays I find myself scratching my head to try to think of what reading might mean if not comprehension…
Cevetti, G. N., & Pearson, P. D. (2023) Disciplinary reading,
action, and social change. The Reading Teacher (0), sss-sss
Yes, yes, and yes. My dissertation research was on the subject of helping adolescents make deep sense of info-texts, and I just submitted my manuscript to Solution Tree on the subject. I have wrestled with the same leaps in logic that you are pointing out, and appreciate the distinctions you draw. I hope you will find my work useful.
Lots of factors interact to determine whether a text is “readable” by particular categories of people. Some are subjective factors hard to predict—prior knowledge of the topic, interest, language, genre experience for example. Some are situational—purpose, motivation, resources available, immediate context. In the literature these are researched as reader variables. Formulas simplify or ignore reader variables because what is available at the time of measurement is a text. A proxy for “reader” is “grade level,” which is handy because in the U.S. we assemble readers into actual grades and assume that readers have enough in common to benefit from a certain level of instruction. Linguistically, word and sentence length are handy measurements also, and they do distinguish texts with more complex syntax and vocabulary from those with less complex words and syntactic demands. At its core, readability formulas are heuristics, based on many assumptions, which yield rough approximations that seem to have functioned well enough for the factory model of schooling to place bulk orders for school books. Over the years I’ve seen efforts to incorporate formulas in writing instruction as a way to remodel difficult linguistics for less sophisticated audiences, and perhaps people still use them, but my experience tells me that such use often produces unsatisfactory results.
In my opinion, these formulas are interesting to study, perhaps useful in some circumstances, but poor substitutes for human judgment. Because AI functions with the same parameters—some standard display of difficulty levels (1-12 grade levels, x to y as in 1-50) based on measurement needs and purposes, language features like vocabulary and syntax, and past history of a text if available. I like what ACT has been doing using subjective rating systems that use expert teacher judgment to match texts with difficulty levels.
Hope this is useful!