Reasons Why Kids Struggle With Reading Comprehension
Reading comprehension is a complex task, yet it’s essential for kids to develop this skill to make progress and grow in school. Reading is not enjoyable if you’re not comprehending the words in front of you. Many students who are resistant to reading really struggle in this area, which just exasperates the issue, plummeting their motivation, and leaving them to flounder through the school year.
So why is it that reading comprehension is such a struggle, and what can you do to help build confidence in this area? Here’s our brain-based approach:
When Do Reading Comprehension Struggles Start to Appear?
When “learning to read” switches to “reading to learn” around 3rd or 4th grade, we hear from so many families with questions about “What happened?!”
Their child was doing well in school, but all of a sudden their grades suffer in subjects like social studies, science, and even math—all because their reading comprehension suffers. Reading is foundational for every subject (as well as many other areas of life beyond school), so struggles in this area begin to have far-reaching effects that can impact a child’s confidence and ability to live up to their full potential.
Some kids can get by in elementary school with weak reading comprehension thanks to accommodations and becoming good “guessers” when there are lots of pictures involved. However, when they reach middle and high school, you begin to see that they aren’t truly “getting” what they read in more complex texts.
The Reading Skills Pyramid: The Foundations of Successful Reading Comprehension
This image shows how reading comprehension is able to happen. Without the strong supporting layers, hang ups will cause students to struggle with higher-level skills. Let’s unpack how each of these areas contributes to problems with reading comprehension…
Starting at the Bottom: Cognitive Skills
Lots of reading instruction and many reading interventions begin by looking at the next level (awareness of sounds); however, there is something even more fundamental to address first. Cognitive skills are the way information is processed and stored in your brain. When one of these skills is weak, no matter how good the instruction is or how many times you repeat content, there is still going to be a struggle.
Key skills that impact reading in particular include:
- Visual and auditory processing
- Attention
- Working memory
- Processing speed
- Logic & reasoning.
If you’re repeating reading instruction or hitting a wall when it comes to reading new words or comprehension, it’s critical to dig back to THIS level to make sure the foundation is solid.
Not sure how your child’s cognitive skills hold up? Check out this FREE brain skills quiz to give you an idea of where their struggle may originate from!
Phonological Awareness
Phonological awareness is the next foundational layer to investigate when your child struggles with reading comprehension. A basic awareness of sounds, recognition of patterns and rhymes, and ability to manipulate sounds in words is critical to become a fluent, confident reader.
Phonemic Awareness
Beyond just individual sounds, phonemic awareness deals with the recognition of word parts and the ability to accurately recognize and manipulate them. According to a 10-year NIH study, 88% of kids who struggle with reading share one common root cause: issues with phonemic awareness.
At LearningRx, we go back to the beginning with every student who completes one of our programs to help identify exactly where these reading issues are stemming from—and to build skill where before kids were able to just “get by.”
Phonics & Decoding
The next layer in learning to read is solid decoding skills. This is the ability to look at a word, connect it to its sounds, accurately blend the sounds, and create an output of the correct word. There are lots of ways things can go wrong here, which is why a brain-based approach is so important.
Many kids become good guessers. They use context clues, pictures, or other “cheats” to get by at lower grades, but as words become more complex, they don’t have the skills to decode what they are, which significantly impacts comprehension.
Fluency
The final layer before comprehension is the ability to read fluently. If a child reads with lots of stops and starts, it’s much harder to get the big picture and understand what the text is saying. Most of the time, issues with fluency also stem from struggles with auditory processing, processing speed, attention, or poor decoding skills. When you build a solid foundation of these skills, fluency is more likely to flow naturally!
Reading Comprehension & Vocabulary
Finally you’ve made it – your child has a solid foundation of each of these essential skills for reading; the final step: building vocabulary. Comprehension depends on being able to connect words with meaning, so if your child reads fluently but still struggles with understanding what the text says, it can be helpful to look at:
- Vocabulary and exposure: have they just not been exposed to many of these words before?
- Long term memory: do they struggle with word recall or drawing on past knowledge to interpret what they read?
- Visual processing: are the words just “words on a page” or is your child able to envision what’s happening (which significantly improves comprehension)?
If you’re not sure where to start, a cognitive skills assessment can help you identify exactly which area is the root cause of your child’s struggles with reading comprehension. This quick test shines a light on which skills are strong and weak, and, in combination with your personal observations of your child’s struggles, can provide a clear path forward to make reading easier and more exciting! Click here to get started today!
