by Jennifer Serravallo
When educators tell me they need to concentrate on building knowledge during a reading lesson and don't have time to teach strategies, I think they're misunderstanding what strategies are for. Skilled readers use comprehension strategies to be active before, during, and after reading which helps them tackle a text’s challenges and learn (build knowledge!) from the text. But students aren't skilled readers yet: they have to be taught how to chart the arc of a character's development across a book, how to track the way an argument shifts from chapter to chapter, how to decide, in real time, what information matters enough to hold onto, or jot down, because it'll be essential pages later.
That's the piece that gets lost when we treat strategies and knowledge as competing priorities. Strategies aren't a detour from knowledge building: they're the process that makes it possible.
Knowledge-building advocates are right that students rely on background knowledge to make sense of what they read. But that shouldn't push out something else we know is critical to reader development, and just as well researched; students can't build knowledge from a text they can't comprehend, and comprehension depends on strategies. Our best comprehension lessons don't choose one or the other; every lesson should include a literacy (skill/strategy) goal, vocabulary, and intentional knowledge-building.
What research tells us
- Reading comprehension strategies draw on working memory to hold new information while retrieving what students already know (Kim, 2017)
- Kids need strategies both to activate prior knowledge and to actively integrate new knowledge — summarizing, inferring, analyzing, determining importance — as they read, to build a coherent understanding of a text (Cervetti & Wright, 2020)
- Combining background knowledge instruction with strategy instruction has a greater effect on comprehension than background knowledge instruction alone (Cromley & Azevedo, 2007)
- For struggling readers, strategies that support main idea, text structure, and retelling produce the biggest comprehension gains when taught and applied together (Peng, et al., 2023)
- Combining literacy and content-area instruction boosts conceptual learning, motivation, strategy use, and overall comprehension all at once (Cervetti & Hiebert, 2015)
What is a reading strategy, really?
There’s no single agreed-upon definition in our field, and I think that ambiguity is part of why so many educators feel unsure how important strategies are to teach. Here’s how I define it: a reading strategy makes something a reader is trying to do doable, actionable, and visible through a step-by-step process.
Comprehension is the goal, and while comprehension strategies are central to reaching it, they’re not the only strategies that get us there. Students also need strategies that build comprehension and knowledge indirectly, by helping them stay in the text long enough, and engaged enough, to actually learn from it:
- Maintaining engagement. Students must learn how to read actively, stay focused amid distractions, set a purpose for reading, and stay motivated.
- Understanding the meanings of words. A reader’s vocabulary knowledge is tightly linked to comprehension. Students who’ve learned to break words into roots, bases, prefixes, and suffixes, look for context clues, or use cognates can apply those strategies to unfamiliar words, and expand both their vocabulary and their grasp of the text.
- Talking about reading. In-the-moment discussion during a lesson, as well as more formal whole-class conversation, gives students the chance to express their ideas, learn from peers, and adjust their thinking. And they need strategies that help them become better speakers and active listeners.
- Writing about reading. Note-taking, annotating, organizing, and categorizing all help students hold onto and deepen what they’ve understood. And most students need to be taught how to take notes or annotate or jot in the margins.
A real strategy gives kids a clear process—not just a directive—and a scaffold, not a destination: the goal is for students to transfer it independently and with automaticity, until they no longer need us to name the steps.
Strategies help kids activate and build knowledge
Here’s the reciprocal part: the more you read, the more you know, but only if you can access relevant background knowledge and connect it to what’s new, and only if you have a way to actually process and retain what the text is telling you. We build knowledge through content study and thoughtful text choices, yes. But active comprehension strategies are what let kids do something with that content so it sticks.
References
Cervetti, G. N., & Hiebert, E. H. (2015). Knowledge, literacy, and the common core. Language Arts, 92(4), 256–269.
Cervetti, G. N., & Wright, T. S. (2020). The role of knowledge in understanding and learning from text. Handbook of reading research (Vol. 5, pp.237–260). Routledge.
Cromley, J. G., & Azevedo, R. (2007). Testing and refining the direct and inferential mediation model of reading comprehension. Journal of Educational Psychology, 99(2), 311.
Kim Y. S. G. (2017). Why the simple view of reading is not simplistic: Unpacking component skills of reading using a direct and indirect effect model of reading (DIER). Scientific Studies of Reading, 21(4), 310–333.
Peng, P., Wang, W., Filderman, M. J., Zhang, W., & Lin, L. (2023). The active ingredient in reading comprehension strategy intervention for struggling readers: A Bayesian network meta- analysis. Review of Educational Research, 1(1), 25–38.
Jennifer Serravallo is the author of more than two dozen bestselling literacy resources for teachers. Her newest resource, Whole Book Comprehension for Grades 1–6, is due out this fall. Each grade-level kit includes eight whole books, four fiction and four nonfiction titles, along with lesson-by-lesson prompts, rubrics, strategies, and conversation scaffolds for teaching them.
