Alabama, Louisiana and Tennessee started reforms later and may need more time. But McGrath’s question remains.
Timothy Shanahan, a veteran reading researcher and professor emeritus at the University of Illinois at Chicago, said reading instruction should continue after students learn to read. “It’s not exactly phonetic,” he said. Teachers must break down multisyllabic words, teach word roots and strange spellings, and find time to read extensively to develop fluency in complex texts.
Shanahan believes schools should teach students to read grade-level texts, even if they are challenging, and provide them with guidance on vocabulary, syntax, and sentence structure.
The research evidence is sometimes confusing on how exactly to help older students with reading comprehension. There is widespread agreement that prior knowledge, vocabulary, and comprehension strategies are all important. But experts and advocates disagree about their relative importance and how much time to devote to them.
Many literacy advocates advocate for greater emphasis on prior knowledge because it is difficult to understand an unfamiliar subject. For example, even if you had a glossary of words, you wouldn’t understand a technical medical article on genetic analysis. Researchers also say that many low-income children are not exposed to as much art, travel and political news at home as wealthier children, meaning that many topics featured in books are less familiar and harder to absorb.
Some research has shown promising improvements in literacy from developing children’s knowledge. Harvard researchers found some success with specially designed science and social studies lessons (not reading lessons). but a 2024 meta-analysis They found no short-term reading benefits from knowledge development units in classrooms. These lessons may take years to improve reading comprehension. And that long arc of progress is difficult for researchers to follow.
“There’s no question that knowledge plays a role in understanding,” Shanahan said. “But it’s been difficult to figure out how that knowledge could be generalized. In other words, if you teach children about goldfish, that may improve their understanding of other texts about goldfish, but will it have any other impact?”
There is also debate about the value of drilling students on reading comprehension questions, the kind that are likely to arise on standardized tests, such as uncovering an author’s main point.
Carl Hendrick, a leading advocate of explicitly teaching children background knowledge and vocabulary, and a professor at the Academic University of Applied Sciences in Amsterdam, agrees that a small amount of strategy instruction can be helpful, such as having students practice writing a summary after reading something. But Hendrick concludes from the research literature that there are diminishing returns to strategy instruction after 10 hours or that. “When a student cannot grasp the main idea of a passage, the problem is almost never that he or she lacks a ‘strategy,'” Hendrick wrote in a March 2026 Newsletter. “The problem is that they don’t understand the words enough.”
Too much screen time can also be a factor. “Kids don’t read as much anymore,” said Sarah Webb, senior director at Great Minds, a curriculum development company. Mobile phones and video games have replaced books. And the less time children practice reading, the less opportunity they will have to improve at it. A Scholastic whitepaper from March 2026, “Students read less and lose stamina: why sustained reading is more important than ever”, highlights the growing decline in reading among preteens and adolescents.
Meanwhile, the growing gap between fourth- and eighth-grade reading scores in the South is leading teachers to question the assumption that high school students already know how to read, Webb said.
“They used to say the progression in school was learning to read and then reading to learn,” Webb said. “Now people realize that they need to do both for much longer. ‘Reading to learn’ should start earlier, and ‘learning to read’ should continue well beyond third grade.”
This story about 8th grade reading was produced by The Hechinger Reportan independent, nonprofit news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Enroll in Test points and others Hechinger Newsletters.
