5 Misconceptions About Comprehension and the Truths We Should Embrace Instead

You’re listening to episode number 233 of the Stellar Teacher Podcast.

How many of you feel like your students struggle to comprehend what they read? Earlier this year, we sent out a survey to some of the teachers in our audience, and over 60% of them said that their students’ biggest challenge was comprehension. So if you’re feeling frustrated or stuck when it comes to helping your students understand what they read, you’re not alone. I definitely felt this challenge when I was in the classroom.

Let me know if any of this sounds familiar to you. When I was a fourth-grade teacher, I was really intentional about teaching comprehension because that’s what my students were tested on. That’s what they needed to know in order to be successful readers. I thought I was doing everything correctly. I would analyze test data, pinpoint the specific comprehension skills or standards that my students needed to work on—things like summarizing or making inferences. I was very intentional about planning lessons where I would model strategies step by step, thinking I was doing everything right.

For example, I would teach my students how to summarize. I would model the process, maybe using the strategy “Somebody Wanted But So Then.” I would show them examples, and we would practice summarizing together. They would practice summarizing with partners, and then I would have them do it independently. We did a lot of the “I do, we do, you do.” So again, I thought I was on the right track.

But then we would get our assessments back. Despite all of this intentional teaching around these comprehension strategies, so many of my students still struggled to summarize or apply whatever strategy I’d taught them. What was even more confusing was that I had some students who did pass the assessments and seemed to master the skill for the moment, but a few months later, on a different assessment, those same students would totally bomb. This left me wondering: Do my students really understand how to comprehend a text? Am I truly teaching them what they need, or are they just getting lucky on tests?

I’m curious if any of this connects with you. When I look back and think about my instruction, I realize that I had a lot of misconceptions about comprehension—about what it is and how to teach it. Ultimately, these misconceptions shaped how I approached my literacy instruction.

So in today’s episode, I’m going to share with you five common misconceptions about comprehension, and these are all misconceptions that I once believed myself. Now, I’m going to be honest with you—sometimes I get nervous about doing “misconception” or “mistake” type episodes because the last thing I want is for you to feel bad about how you’re currently teaching. I don’t want you to listen to these and think, “Oh my gosh, this is exactly what I’m doing,” and feel bad about it.

The truth is, our beliefs shape our actions. If we hold on to misconceptions about comprehension, those beliefs will influence our teaching practices and might unintentionally hold our students back from reaching their full potential. Since you’re here and you tune into this podcast every week, I know that you’re dedicated to providing effective literacy instruction. You want to ensure you’re teaching in a way that is backed by evidence and research, which means we sometimes need to address misconceptions and misbeliefs, stay open to evolving our beliefs, and remain willing to learn new things.

Before we dive in, though, I want to extend a special invitation to join our Comprehension Reset Challenge. It’s not starting until January 11, but it’s a free, four-day challenge that will provide you with short, evidence-based strategy videos to your inbox every single day, and it’s really going to help you understand how to help your students build lasting comprehension.

As you’re listening to today’s episode, if you find yourself connecting with these misconceptions and saying, “Okay, yeah, this is what I believe. This is currently how I’m teaching,” and you’re really wondering what to do instead, then the challenge is going to be perfect for you. You can go ahead and add your name to the list at stellarteacher.com/reset, and you’ll be able to kick off the new semester with a fresh approach to how you teach comprehension.

So let’s dive into some of these misconceptions.

Misconception Number One: Comprehension is a skill.

We’re going to start with this big misconception—the idea that comprehension is an individual skill. Here’s the truth: it’s not a skill. Comprehension is an outcome. It’s the ultimate goal of our reading instruction. It’s what we want our students to achieve every time they engage with a text.

If you’ve listened to the podcast before, you’ve probably heard me talk about Scarborough’s Reading Rope. If you’re not familiar with it, or you need a refresher, go back and listen to episode number 87, where I really break it down in detail. Scarborough’s Reading Rope is a powerful visual model that illustrates what skilled reading looks like and shows how the different components of literacy are woven together to create strong, capable readers.

The rope consists of two main strands. There’s the upper strand, which represents language comprehension skills, including background knowledge, vocabulary, syntax, verbal reasoning, and literacy knowledge. Then there’s the lower strand, which represents word recognition skills, including phonological awareness, decoding, and sight word recognition.

When these elements are woven together tightly, they form skilled reading. And what is skilled reading? It’s the ability to understand what you read.

Here’s the key takeaway: comprehension isn’t one of the individual strands we can teach by itself. It’s the result of students developing both language comprehension and word recognition skills and applying them seamlessly while reading.

If we can really view comprehension as an outcome rather than a standalone skill, it’s going to help us refocus our teaching. Instead of asking, “How do I teach comprehension?” we need to ask, “How do I strengthen the components that lead to comprehension?” I really think this shift in perspective can make a huge difference in how we approach literacy instruction and, ultimately, in how we help our students become skilled readers.

Misconception Number Two: Comprehension can be taught in isolation.

This is something I fell into early on in my teaching. I believed that comprehension could be taught in isolation.

Here’s the truth: comprehension relies on many interconnected elements. We just talked about Scarborough’s Reading Rope, and I’ll mention it again because it beautifully illustrates how, in order for students to comprehend a text, they need to have a variety of skills.

We can’t just teach comprehension by itself. To comprehend a text, students need strong decoding skills. If a student can’t read the words on a page, how are they going to understand what the text is about?

Students also need a robust vocabulary. Research shows that students need to know 90 to 95% of the words in a text—not just recognize them but have a strong understanding of them. The words that they read must be part of their individual lexicon so they can instantly retrieve them while reading. Students must know a lot of words to understand what they’re reading.

But word knowledge isn’t enough. Students also need background knowledge. Comprehension happens when students can connect new information to what they already know.

I’ve talked about Marilyn Adams and her famous “mental Velcro” analogy before. 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.

And in addition to all of these things, students also have to have an understanding of syntax and text structure. Now, I’ve shared this quote before, but I’ll share it again because I love it. In Nancy Hennessy’s The Reading Comprehension Blueprint, she says that comprehension begins at the sentence level. So if our students cannot navigate and understand the structure of a complex sentence, a compound sentence, or the relationship between clauses, then they’re really going to struggle to comprehend what is happening at the sentence level. And if they can’t comprehend at the sentence level, how are they going to understand the entire text?

Thinking about all of these skills—decoding, vocabulary, background knowledge, syntax, and text structure—at no point are we teaching an individual, isolated comprehension skill. Yet, all of these elements impact a student’s ability to comprehend a text. So if we try to teach comprehension as a standalone lesson without addressing these elements, then we’re really not giving students the full support they need to be successful readers.

For example, you could teach a lesson on how to identify the main idea. But if your students can’t decode the text, are they going to be able to identify the main idea? Probably not. If they don’t have the vocabulary to understand what’s happening—especially if it’s related to the topic—are they going to be able to easily identify the main idea? And if they can’t break apart the syntax and text structure, are they going to be able to determine the main idea? Probably not.

We can teach individual comprehension lessons, but unless we approach our literacy instruction holistically, we’re not providing students with the support they truly need. Some good questions to ask yourself might be: What background knowledge might students be missing in order to understand the text? What vocabulary words could possibly trip them up? What sentence structures might be challenging for them?

When we move away from thinking about comprehension as an isolated skill and instead consider factors like background knowledge, vocabulary, and sentence structure, we create the right conditions for students to become more competent and capable readers. This helps set them up for true comprehension success. They’ll then be able to apply the strategies we’re teaching them, but we cannot teach comprehension in isolation.

Misconception Number Three: Comprehension is easily assessed.

Now, this one might sting a little because I know that, as teachers, it’s tempting to rely on quick, multiple-choice comprehension tests. I did it when I was in the classroom. They’re easy to grade, easy to administer, and they align with what our students are tested on at the end of the year. But here’s the truth: comprehension is incredibly complex, which makes it really hard to assess.

It’s important to recognize that comprehension will look different for every student. Every reader brings a different set of prior knowledge to the reading experience, which means each reader will make a different set of connections, ask different questions, and even summarize the text in a unique way. But just because a reader’s responses differ, that doesn’t mean they aren’t comprehending.

While multiple-choice assessments are convenient, they don’t give us a full picture of what our students really understand. They rarely capture the depth of a student’s understanding or whether they can actually apply a comprehension skill. In fact, students have a one-in-four chance of getting the correct answer just by guessing, which means they might not even be comprehending; they’re just learning the process of elimination.

I understand that, especially if you work in a school with many grade-level requirements, multiple-choice assessments can feel like the easiest option. However, we shouldn’t rely solely on them to assess comprehension. They’re not the best or most effective way to assess our students.

Instead we really want to think about how we can use 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. We can do things like include open ended questions or written responses, or have our students explain why they chose 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, recognizing that you can assess comprehension through discussions that happen at a small group table or even one-on-one. The more diverse your approach to assessment, the clearer picture you can get of your students’ true abilities. But it’s important to recognize that comprehension is not easily assessed. As a system as a whole, we rely way too much on multiple-choice tests, so we have to be aware of that and be willing to put additional structures in place that allow us to get a fuller picture of our students’ overall reading abilities.

Misconception Number Four: Teaching state standards leads to comprehension.
This is something I hear a lot from teachers—the idea that “I just need to teach my state standards, and if I teach them well enough, my students will comprehend.” The truth is, meeting your state standards is important, but comprehension depends on so much more.

Obviously, we can’t ignore our state standards. They are a requirement and part of our job. They’re what our states and districts tell us we have to teach. However, we have to realize that state standards are not a roadmap for achieving comprehension. They are a list of expectations that students need to meet by the end of the year.

Often, we treat standards as a checklist of objectives to teach in isolation throughout the year, but they are actually end-of-year expectations. By the end of the year, we want our students to be able to demonstrate these skills. It’s our job as educators to think about how we can structure and set up our literacy blocks in a way that will allow students to be successful in demonstrating these objectives by the end of the year. But that doesn’t mean we have to expect mastery early on in the year, and it’s also important to recognize that mastery doesn’t come from teaching state standards in isolation.

Yes, we want our students to be able to summarize, find the main idea, and make inferences. But comprehension doesn’t happen just by teaching each of these skills in isolation or focusing on them one at a time. Think for a moment about your own reading experiences. When you sit down to read for fun or work, more than likely, when you’re reading, you’re asking questions, while making inferences, and summarizing as you go, and visualizing what you’re reading—all simultaneously. You’re not doing these things one at a time.

When you sit down to read, you don’t say, “Okay, I’m only going to work on identifying the main idea.” But in our classrooms, we often approach comprehension as though our students will master one standard at a time and then automatically become skilled readers after two or three lessons on the main idea. We make it our sole focus for a short period and expect mastery.

As I mentioned earlier, comprehension is influenced by so many elements—background knowledge, vocabulary, syntax, and more. Teaching a single standard, like summarizing, is not a guarantee that students will understand every text they encounter moving forward. Our job isn’t just to check off standards. It’s to create lessons that address the many factors that contribute to comprehension and create conditions for deep understanding.

In the book Shifting the Balance, if you’ve read it or were part of our author study, you might remember a section where the authors discuss how teaching reading strategies is a low-cost way to give developing readers a boost, but it should only be a small part of a teacher’s job. Acquiring a broad vocabulary and a rich base of background knowledge will yield more substantial and longer-term benefits.

I think the reason we get so hung up on teaching our standards, and teaching them in isolation, is because of our end-of-year state tests. Each question is categorized or correlated to a standard. We know that if students miss Question Four, it means they struggle with making inferences or identifying the main idea. This gives us a list of standards our students struggle with.

But what we fail to recognize is that maybe they missed the question not because they don’t know how to identify the main idea, but because they didn’t have the vocabulary to understand the text. Or perhaps they lacked the background knowledge. Maybe the sentences were too complex, and they couldn’t break them apart, which impacted their comprehension. Or even stepping further back, they might not have been able to decode the words in the text.

So, they can probably find the main idea if all of those other things are in place. Ultimately, we really want to shift from thinking about our standards as a checklist approach to thinking of them as things we want to integrate into our reading experiences. Recognizing that when we sit down to read, we’re going to be addressing, practicing, discussing, and modeling multiple standards at once, because that’s what we do when we read.

Misconception Number Five: Comprehension strategies and skills should be our main focus.

Okay, the last misconception is that comprehension strategies and skills should be our main focus. This may or may not surprise you, but so often, as we continue to align our instruction with the science of reading, we recognize that having a singular strategy focus for the week may not be the best approach.

For example, when I taught in the classroom, I would say, “Okay, for this entire week, we’re going to focus on the main idea,” or “For this entire week, we’re going to focus on summarizing.” The truth is, these strategies are important. It is important for us to teach summarizing and main idea, but these strategies are tools to support comprehension—they’re not the end goal. Sometimes, we lose sight of what the goal is. As reading teachers and literacy teachers, we want to teach our students all these things. But if we think about the bigger picture, students come to school to acquire knowledge and to build knowledge. Knowledge-building needs to be a priority in our literacy instruction as well.

It doesn’t have to be an either/or situation. It doesn’t need to be, “We used to focus on strategies, and now we’re only going to focus on knowledge-building.” It can be both. But 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.

For example, if you have a student reading a text about photosynthesis and they have no prior knowledge of how plants generate energy, they’re going to struggle to comprehend the text, no matter how well they’ve mastered finding the main idea in a different text or content area. On the other hand, if a student has the background knowledge and vocabulary related to the topic, they’ll be able to make connections, deepen their understanding, summarize the text, find the main idea, and ask questions. This is because they have the knowledge to understand, interact with, and engage in the text.

Knowledge-building really does need to be an important part of our literacy instruction. It’s not that we want to forget about comprehension strategies—we just don’t want them to be our main focus.

Some simple things we can do in our literacy blocks to make knowledge-building more prominent include really thinking about the texts we select. Choose texts for their content, not just their ability to teach a strategy. For example, when I was in the classroom, I would think, “Okay, I’m teaching main idea this week, so let me find texts with a clear main idea.” Instead, we can think, “I want to teach my students about photosynthesis, so let me find multiple texts on this topic.”, so as students read and jump from text to text, they use their background knowledge to strengthen and deepen their understanding of the topic and what they’re reading.  So we want to really choose texts for their content, not for the ability to teach a strategy.

We should also teach with related text sets. Pick a topic and select multiple texts related to that topic, because this helps students deepen their knowledge. When students have knowledge about a topic and the vocabulary to match, comprehension becomes much easier.

Be intentional about incorporating more nonfiction texts, especially in science and social studies, and really giving students opportunities to explore topics in depth. Rather than stopping at, “Okay, we applied the basic standard, like main idea or summarizing,” we should ask, “Can our students write about this topic? Can they discuss it? Can they do additional research to explore the topic in depth?” We want to move beyond surface-level exploration and dig deep for longer-lasting comprehension.

Ultimately, when we prioritize knowledge-building, we teach both reading and content at the same time, which sets our students up for true comprehension. It also makes your job easier because you’re not trying to find time to cover all these different subjects separately.

So, there you have it—five misconceptions about comprehension and the truths we should embrace instead. Remember, comprehension is complex. It’s not straightforward or clear-cut. But when we shift our mindset and approach, we can help our students grow into skilled, competent readers.

When you think about your own instruction, consider some of these things: How can you focus more on comprehension as an outcome rather than treating it as an individual skill? How can you integrate more knowledge-building and vocabulary-building into your lessons? And how can you assess comprehension in a way that captures your students’ understanding authentically, rather than relying solely on quick multiple-choice assessments?

Of course, if you’re looking for specific strategies backed by research, join us for our FREE Comprehension Reset Challenge. You can add your name to the list at stellarteacher.com/reset, so you’ll be ready to join us when we start the challenge on January 11.

I hope this episode leaves you inspired to rethink and refine your comprehension instruction. Thank you so much for tuning in, and I’ll see you back here next Monday!