The IES practice guide on Improving Reading Comprehension in Kindergarten Through 3rd Grade provides the following five specific recommendations to successfully improve reading comprehension for young readers:
1. Teach students how to use reading comprehension strategies.
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Teach students how to use several research-based reading comprehension strategies.
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Teach reading comprehension strategies individually or in combination.
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Teach reading comprehension strategies by using a gradual release of responsibility.
2. Teach students to identify and use the text’s organizational structure to comprehend, learn, and remember content.
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Explain how to identify and connect the parts of narrative texts.
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Provide instruction on common structures of informational texts.
3. Guide students through focused, high-quality discussion on the meaning of text.
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Structure the discussion to complement the text, the instructional purpose, and the readers’ ability and grade level.
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Develop discussion questions that require students to think deeply about text.
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Ask follow-up questions to encourage and facilitate discussion.
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Have students lead structured small-group discussions.
4. Select texts purposefully to support comprehension development.
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Teach reading comprehension with multiple genres of text.
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Choose texts of high quality with richness and depth of ideas and information.
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Choose texts with word recognition and comprehension difficulty appropriate for the students’ reading ability and the instructional activity.
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Use texts that support the purpose of instruction.
5. Establish an engaging and motivating context in which to teach reading comprehension.
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Help students discover the purpose and benefits of reading.
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Create opportunities for students to see themselves as successful readers.
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Give students reading choices.
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Give students the opportunity to learn by collaborating with their peers.
