Comprehension isn’t just a process, or just a product—it’s both. And connecting reading and understanding is what most teachers are working on every day.
That fundamental connection was the focus of our recent Science of Reading Webinar Week: Comprehension Connections—Building the Bridge Between Reading and Understanding, a five-day, expert-filled series that unpacked what really drives comprehension, from early decoding to middle school mastery.
Here’s a quick look at what you’ll learn when you watch—and a few ideas you can use right away.
Day 1: What Is Reading Comprehension, Anyway?
Speaker: Susan Lambert, Ed.D., Chief Academic Officer, Literacy, Amplify; Host of Science of Reading: The Podcast
“Reading comprehension is more than just language comprehension. It’s language comprehension on the page, which makes it much more complex.” — Susan Lambert, Ed.D.
If you ask ten teachers to define comprehension, you might get twelve answers. Lambert opened the week by grounding everyone in the Science of Reading, including the Simple View of Reading and the Reading Rope. Skilled reading, she reminded viewers, is the result of multiple strands—decoding, language comprehension, and knowledge—woven together over time.
The takeaway? The most effective approaches don’t teach comprehension strategies—such as “find the main idea”—in isolation. Rather, they connect word recognition to meaning through rich texts, conversation, and writing. Whether you’re teaching second-grade reading comprehension or sixth-grade reading comprehension, students need the same thing: a clear path from sounding out words to making sense of ideas.
Day 2: Comprehension and Knowledge Building: A Two-Way Street
Speakers: Sonia Cabell, Ph.D., Sigmon Endowed Professor of Reading Education, Florida State University
HyeJin Hwang, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, Department of Educational Psychology, University of Minnesota Twin Cities
“Better background knowledge leads to improved reading comprehension, which in turn enables readers to learn more from text, thereby building additional knowledge.” —HyeJin Hwang, Ph.D.
In their session, Sonia Cabell and HyeJin Hwang explored one of the clearest findings in reading research: Comprehension and knowledge develop together. Cabell began by explaining how comprehension (including oral language, background knowledge, vocabulary, syntax, and verbal reasoning) forms one of the essential strands of the Reading Rope.
Students can’t activate knowledge they don’t yet have. Teachers need to help them build it early, and intentionally. Cabell’s research found that integrating literacy and content instruction produced gains in vocabulary and content knowledge.
Likewise, Hwang’s two large-scale longitudinal studies showed that better knowledge instruction leads to better reading, which leads to even more knowledge. These findings held true across languages and grade levels, underscoring the universal value of content-rich instruction.
Classroom takeaways:
- Plan literacy units around connected science or social studies topics to build coherent knowledge.
- Use content-rich interactive read-alouds with discussion before, during, and after reading.
- Ask inferential comprehension questions (“Why?” “How?”) that require students to connect ideas using their own words.
- Encourage quick writing or drawing tasks that help students show what they’ve learned.
Day 3: Where and How to Measure Comprehension to Drive Improvement
Speakers: Danielle Damico, Ph.D., Executive Director of Learning Science, Amplify
Gina Biancarosa, Ed.D., Ann Swindells Chair in Education, University of Oregon
“Reading comprehension is both a process and a product.” —Danielle Damico, Ph.D.
Too often, comprehension is measured only as a finished product—how well students answer questions after reading—without revealing how they built understanding along the way. This session explored what comprehension actually involves: reading words accurately, understanding their meaning, applying background knowledge, and making inferences. As researcher Sharon Vaughn, Ph.D., has described, these interconnected skills all work together as students learn to read.
Biancarosa showed how looking at comprehension as a complex process helps teachers see student thinking in action. She described the major types of inferences—lexical, bridging, gap-filling, and causal—and the importance of understanding how students connect ideas and construct meaning.
Try this:
- Treat comprehension as ongoing thinking, not a one-time test score.
- Use brief think-alouds or class discussions to get a look at how students connect ideas.
- Match assessments to the precise question you’re trying to answer.
- Let assessment guide instruction—data should lead directly to next steps.
Day 4: Comprehension in Middle School: More Important Than Ever
Speaker: Deb Sabin, Chief Academic Officer, Amplify ELA
“Writing done right encodes knowledge. And discourse done right gets into the realm of higher-order thinking.” —Deb Sabin
By the time you’re teaching fourth-grade reading comprehension through sixth-grade reading comprehension, decoding should be automatic. At this stage, the upper strands of the Reading Rope—vocabulary, background knowledge, and syntax—move to the forefront. In this session, Deb Sabin highlighted how comprehension in middle school relies on academic knowledge, disciplinary vocabulary, and structured discourse—and how it truly blossoms when reading, writing, and speaking reinforce one another.
Classroom moves that help:
- Pair writing with reading: Even short, text-based responses consolidate knowledge in long-term memory.
- Use structured discussion (“accountable talk”), where students cite text evidence and build on one another’s ideas.
- Center rich, grade-level texts that challenge thinking and vocabulary.
Day 5: Finding the Missing Link in Reading Comprehension to Boost Literacy Success
Speaker: Julie A. Van Dyke, Ph.D., Clinical Assistant Professor, Yale University Child Study Center; Research Scientist, Yale-UConn Haskins Global Literacy Hub
“Teach phonics for decoding. Teach syntax for understanding.” —Julie A. Van Dyke, Ph.D.
In the final presentation of the series, Julie Van Dyke explored an often-overlooked element of comprehension: syntax—the way words combine to create meaning. Van Dyke argued that syntax is to comprehension what phonics is to decoding.
She illustrated how the Science of Reading and the Reading Rope locate syntax within the language-comprehension strands—critical to understanding who did what to whom in complex sentences. Explicitly teaching sentence structure helps all learners, including multilingual/English learners, access higher-level meaning.
Simple practices can make a difference:
- Have students paraphrase tricky sentences. (Starter question: “Who’s doing the action?”)
- Pull strong sentences from your class texts to show how structure shapes meaning.
- Encourage students to mirror those structures in their own writing.
What linked all five sessions together? The understanding that comprehension develops when teachers connect the code, the language, and the knowledge. Whether students are decoding in second grade or crafting essays in sixth, they thrive when we help them move from reading to understanding—step by step, strand by strand.
Watch all five on-demand recordings.
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