The Impact of Strategy-Instruction: Are We Actually Preparing Students to Tackle Increasingly Complex Text?

Joan Sedita is one of those voices in literacy who commands quite an influential group of followers in the world of K-12 literacy instruction. I have long admired her work on adolescent literacy, in particular, her work on The Writing Rope. So, when she writes an article defending comprehension strategy instruction, it naturally piques my curiosity. In her blog post titled, “In Support of Main Idea and Comprehension Strategy Instruction,” Sedita argues that comprehension strategies and background knowledge are, in fact, complementary. Her argument focuses primarily on the power of guiding students to identify and address main ideas in texts, along with a few additional strategies like making predictions, self-monitoring, and the use of graphic organizers, among others.

I don’t mean for this to sound like an uncharitable critique of Sedita’s work. My ultimate concern is the disproportionate emphasis we continue to place on comprehension strategy instruction, often at the expense of engaging deeply with text. Sedita has, no doubt, made sizable contributions to the world of literacy. But I will say that the strategy-focus we have long had in schools across the nation has fundamentally altered how teachers approach texts with the students in their classrooms. In particular, how elementary teachers approach comprehension with their students.

While I can appreciate the amicable view Sedita poises that strategy instruction and background knowledge go hand-in-hand, I fear that this inclusive view is giving far too much credit to strategy-instruction’s ability to impact a student’s comprehension. And in truth, this often creates unnecessary confusion for teachers. Because elementary educators are often responsible for teaching across multiple disciplines, navigating conflicting guidance about effective literacy instruction becomes even more challenging. It would behoove us, then, to focus our energy on helping teachers teach the texts they must teach well. Rather than focusing on strategies, effective literacy instruction ought to be grounded in developing teachers’ content knowledge, their skill at explicit language instruction, and their ability to engage students in rich, complex texts.

Revisiting the Research on Strategy-Instruction

I think the harder question is not whether strategy instruction has been studied—because, obviously, it has. Extensively. Sadita cites several of these studies in her post, but undoubtedly one of the largest is the National Reading Panel’s 2000 review. This review is often used to justify the inclusion of strategy-instruction in ELA classrooms across the nation and has been highly influential in shaping American reading instruction. However, one cannot conclude a causal relationship (i.e., strategies make you a better reader) from the correlation (better readers tend to use strategies) in many of the studies, and in virtually all of the studies, the experimenter selected the reading material and designed the comprehension tests. Furthermore, the research has yet to adequately resolve: (1) How much strategy instruction is actually beneficial to students? And (2) To what extent does sustained practice with strategies actually improve students’ ability to independently comprehend increasingly complex and unfamiliar texts?

Interestingly, many of the studies Sedita references in her blog post do not examine the effects of individual comprehension strategies in isolation. And to this point, Sedita does argue that strategies must be coupled with background knowledge. But this makes it even more difficult to determine precisely how much improvement can be attributed to strategy instruction itself. Perhaps more importantly, it’s impossible to really know whether those gains will ultimately translate to students’ ability to independently comprehend increasingly complex and unfamiliar texts.

A worthwhile read that is (unsurprisingly) absent from Sedita’s review of the research on strategy-instruction is Daniel Willingham’s 2006 article, “The Usefulness of Brief Instruction in Reading Comprehension Strategies.” Here, Willingham cautions that “the evidence for the effectiveness of reading strategies is weak for students in the third grade or earlier” and that “spending a lot of time practicing strategies” does not actually improve reading comprehension. A key takeaway from this piece is Willingham’s belief that strategies function like “tricks” (similar to checking your work in math); useful, if you know them, and know the processes, but not particularly helpful if a student struggles to decode, to understand complex sentence structures, or to draw upon the background knowledge necessary to make sense of a text.

But Sedita offers a different perspective. Instead of Willingham’s work, she examines Stevens, Park & Vaughn’s 2019 research, which explores the effects of summarizing and main idea interventions on reading comprehension outcomes of struggling readers in grades 3-12. This particular study, on the surface, seems impressive because it boasts a large effect size (0.97). Yet in 96 of the 103 effect-size estimates, students were tested on researcher-developed assessments. These tests were designed to closely align with what students had been taught in the intervention. In these tasks, students were essentially taught a procedure and then asked to demonstrate their understanding by application with a similar task. Only three of the studies measured in the review included standardized reading comprehension assessments, and those findings were considerably less impressive: predominantly small positive or even negative effects.

Another source she relies on, Peng et al.’s 2024 study on strategy intervention of struggling readers, similarly is less impressive than a surface read would suggest. Also focused on students in grades 3-12, this study examines commonly taught comprehension strategies to include main idea, inferencing, text structure, retell, prediction, self-monitoring and graphic organizers. Yet the results from this study seem even more disappointing than the first:

1)    instruction of more strategies did not necessarily have stronger effects on reading comprehension; (2) there was no single reading comprehension strategy that produced the strongest effect; (3) main idea, text structure, and retell, taught together as the primary strategies, seemed the most effective; and (4) the effects of strategies only held when background knowledge instruction was included (Peng et al., 2024).

That hardly feels like much of a win. If the benefits of strategy instruction dependsubstantially on the inclusion of background knowledge, then can we actually establish that main idea instruction is all that influential at all?

The other studies Sedita cites, Filderman et al.’s 2022 work on the effects of reading interventions for struggling readers in 3-12 grade, and Boardman et al.’s 2015 work on Collaborative Strategic Reading (CSR), similarly have problematic casual evidence to support the conclusion that strategy-instruction aids comprehension. While Filderman et al.’s (2022) work reported positive effects, the combination of instructional components across the studies examined make it difficult to isolate the specific effect comprehension strategies had on student outcomes, or their broader transferability. Similarly, Boardman et al. (2015) found only a small improvement on one standardized comprehension measure, with no significant improvement on state assessments. Interestingly, even Sedita’s reference to Shanahan’s 2023 blog post, in which he describes writing down important ideas from paragraphs when he’s reading particularly challenging material, illustrates how proficient readers strategically employ tools they find useful—but that doesn’t mean teaching those strategies is what made them proficient readers in the first place.

Complex Texts Rarely Follow Predictable Patterns

Much of these arguments come down to the notion that if we teach students the right types of strategies, enough times, and with sufficient tenacity, students will then be able to apply these strategies to increasingly complex texts—and by golly—they will become masters of complex literature. It would seem to me that with all we know about how reading comprehension develops, this is a rather outdated, and somewhat backward clinging view of comprehension. Particularly when we define comprehension as the process of simultaneously extracting and constructing meaning through interaction and involvement with written language.

Consider, for example, the common practice of teaching plot structure as a discrete, transferable reading skill. My sophomore English class was an adventure into the world of literature beyond American and British texts. During our Magical Realism unit, students explored the novella, Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel García Márquez which follows a nonlinear plotline told through fragmented memories and conflicting accounts. The structure itself contributes to the novel’s exploration of collective responsibility and the unreliability of memory. But my students did not automatically apply a repertoire of hidden skills to attack nonlinear plot structures. Their comprehension largely depended on their ability to reconstruct events, navigate unfamiliar historical and cultural references, and examine how the author’s structural choices contributed to the meaning of the work. These things, by the way, I taught my students explicitly. This is a prime example of how the complexity of literature emerges from the interaction of language, structure, knowledge and meaning the work provides.

Truthfully, there are more texts than not that follow these “unpredictable” text structures: The Sound and the Fury, Beloved, Slaughterhouse-Five, The Things They Carried, Catch-22…and those are just the classics. These are each rich, layered, intellectually demanding works of literature that invite readers to wrestle with complex ideas, examine the human condition, and consider interpretations that extend beyond the text. My point is that this instruction began with the text. The purpose of teaching text structure should be to improve comprehension of a particular text, so that students can then engage in the deeper intellectual work of understanding the relationship between the structure and the meaning. Texts should be driving the type of instruction that is happening in English classrooms, rather than the strategies we choose to teach.

Comprehension Monitoring is Useful—When You Can Tell Your Comprehension Is Faltering

Sedita and others have pointed to the strategy commonly called “comprehension monitoring” as a means by which students may monitor their own understanding of a text, detect when their understanding is breaking down, and decide how to respond. In my experience, this often looks like a student re-reading and re-reading and re-reading a passage, often to no avail. When a student struggles to comprehend a text, it is hardly going to be easy for them to recognize when their comprehension falters—and what to do about it. There is some research which has found mixed results in comprehension monitoring—but these findings failed to translate to measurable gains on broader reading assessments. Other studies suggest that while readers may benefit from recognizing when their comprehension breaks down, their ability to resolve that confusion depends largely on their linguistic knowledge and background knowledge.

Inference is Such a Great Skill—Let’s Teach it! But wait. What Even is it?!

And last, but certainly not least, what about the many mini-lessons on ‘What is an Inference?’ I would argue inferencing is the one area teachers most frequently ask me for support. Many spend an inordinate amount of time conducting mini-lessons on this “skill” and still find themselves frustrated when students struggle to infer. Perhaps most challenging is that researchers have used varying, and sometimes conflicting, definitions of what inferencing actually means, with little consistency between the types of inferences students are taught to make and those they are subsequently assessed on. These inconsistencies make it difficult to determine what type of inference instruction is the most effective, or even if these question types translate to a student’s ability to comprehend complex texts.

For our purposes, inference, broadly defined, involves constructing meaning that is not explicitly stated in the text, often requiring students to integrate both textual information with their existing world knowledge—and this often requires them to also know a good deal about the author and historical context of a work. There is some evidence that would suggest that there is good sense in inference instruction. Elleman’s 2017 meta-analysis of 25, K-12 studies found positive effects of inference instruction on general reading comprehension (0.58). However, again, the interventions often combined several instructional approaches, and 92% of the assessments that specifically measured students’ inference abilities were researcher-created and not standardized.

It seems to me that, particularly for something as complex as inference, we are placing disproportionate emphasis on teaching strategies rather than developing the knowledge students need to make meaningful inferences in the first place. For one thing, we know that authors often write for audiences who share certain assumptions, beliefs, experiences and cultural knowledge. Oftentimes, this information is left unstated because authors can reasonably expect their contemporary readers to understand it.

Consider, for instance, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Throughout the novel, Shelley draws upon a rich tradition of literary, biblical and mythological references to John Milton’s Paradise Lost, the Greek myth of Prometheus, the biblical creation story, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s gothic poem, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Students who lack familiarity with these references can still easily follow along with the general plot of the novel. In fact, in a “main idea” lesson, they may perform exceptionally well.

But ask students to infer broader parallels between Victor Frankenstein and God, or why the Creature identifies with both Adam and Satan in Paradise Lost, and suddenly the intellectual demands of the text become considerably greater. Ask students to infer broader messages that Shelley may have been making, and you might only get surface-level responses. Again, the text matters enormously. What questions are we asking students about this text? What broader knowledge are we giving them when they engage with this text? If teachers have not explicitly taught the literary and cultural allusions necessary to understand these deeper meanings, why would we expect another mini-lesson on making inferences to solve the problem?

Strategy-Instruction: Types, The Research & The Impact

Willingham’s conclusion that “teaching reading strategies is a low-cost way to give developing readers a boost” but that it “should be a small part of a teacher’s job” seems to go against Sedita’s belief that strategy instruction is a skill that is ultimately transferable to new texts. In this belief, Sedita hardly is alone. In a recent Thomas B Fordham Institute’s report on the nation’s progress with the Science of Reading, the researchers found that many K-3 teachers still conceptualize reading comprehension as a generalizable skill. Consider how much some curriculum materials center lessons and activities on repetitive strategy instruction like identifying key details or determining a central idea or theme. Oftentimes, these activities become central to the lesson goal, as opposed to a text-centered approach. Even when teachers have materials that could offer richer intellectual engagement, standards and professional learning often emphasize discrete reading skills, over robust text instruction. Take, for example, a 2025 study by Reynolds et al. which examined 111 comprehension lessons across four districts using highly-rated, knowledge-rich curriculum—including CKLA, Wit & Wisdom and EL Education. Despite widespread implementation of those materials, researchers found that 67% of the observed lessons involved instructional activities that facilitated only surface-level understanding of texts.

Sedita points her readers to the Keys to Literacy’s “Comprehension Routines” that focus on teaching students a “foundational set of research-based comprehension strategies” that are meant to support a student’s listening and comprehension “in any subject area.” I could go through each of these and try to find the research base for them…but that feels a little unproductive. Afterall, the real issue is that far too many classrooms are focusing on the wrong things. We are prioritizing the practice of comprehension strategies over the deeper intellectual work of comprehending complex texts.

As students encounter increasingly sophisticated literature, literary analysis is not just going to be about identifying the main idea. Instead, students will be asked to develop and defend their own interpretations about the meanings of a text—and support their analysis with justifications of their findings. These skills require students to wrestle with language, ideas, context and meaning—all concepts that cannot simply be reduced to a repertoire of transferable comprehension strategies.

Ultimately, I get very concerned when conversations slip back into promoting strategy-based instruction in English Language Arts classrooms, even when they are well-intentioned and partnered with the admission that knowledge building is exceptionally important to comprehension. Particularly because there is still no convincing, direct K-12 experimental evidence to suggest that repeated instruction in comprehension strategies can produce improvements in a students’ ability to interpret progressively more complex literary works. Perhaps even more detrimental is the way this emphasis shapes teachers’ professional learning, directing attention toward isolated comprehension skills and strategy-based instruction and interventions, rather than developing teachers’ disciplinary expertise, their understanding of the texts they teach, and their ability to guide students through the intellectual complexities of those works.

Far too few teachers are adequately prepared and supported to (1) center their instruction around rich, complex texts; (2) explicitly build the background knowledge necessary to understand those texts through complimentary literary and informational works; (3) provide thorough vocabulary and language instruction that deepens students’ understanding of the text; and (4) teach students to develop, articulate, and defend their interpretations through writing. If we could spend more time on these skills, rather than returning again to comprehension strategies, perhaps we could finally begin developing the sophisticated readers we claim to want.

References

Boardman, A. G., Klingner, J. K., Buckley, P., Annamma, S., & Lasser, C. J. (2015). The efficacy of Collaborative Strategic Reading in middle school science and social studies classes. Reading and Writing, 28(9), 1257–1283. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11145-015-9570-3

Connor, C. M., Phillips, B. M., Kim, Y. G., Lonigan, C. J., Kaschak, M. P., Crowe, E., … Al Otaiba, S. (2018). Examining the Efficacy of Targeted Component Interventions on Language and Literacy for Third and Fourth Graders Who are at Risk of Comprehension Difficulties. Scientific Studies of Reading, 22(6), 462–484. https://doi.org/10.1080/10888438.2018.1481409

Elleman, A. M. (2017). Examining the impact of inference instruction on the literal and inferential comprehension of skilled and less skilled readers: A meta-analytic review. Journal of Educational Psychology, 109(6), 761–781. https://doi.org/10.1037/edu0000180

Filderman, M. J., Austin, C. R., Boucher, A. N., O’Donnell, K., & Swanson, E. A. (2022). A Meta-Analysis of the Effects of Reading Comprehension Interventions on the Reading Comprehension Outcomes of Struggling Readers in Third Through 12th Grades. Exceptional Children, 88(2), 163-184. https://doi.org/10.1177/00144029211050860

Griffith, D., & Fitzpatrick, B. R. (2026, April 29). From the teacher’s desk: A science of reading progress report. Thomas B. Fordham Institute.https://fordhaminstitute.org/national/research/teachers-desk-science-reading-progress-report

Keys to Literacy. (n.d.). The Key Comprehension Routine. https://keystoliteracy.com/offering/key-comprehension-routine/

National Reading Panel. (2000). Teaching children to read: An evidence-based assessment of the scientific research literature on reading and its implications for reading instruction (NIH Publication No. 00-4769). National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. https://www.nichd.nih.gov/publications/pubs/nrp/smallbook

Peng, P., Wang, W., Filderman, M. J., Zhang, W., & Lin, L. (2024). The Active Ingredient in Reading Comprehension Strategy Intervention for Struggling Readers: A Bayesian Network Meta-analysis. Review of Educational Research, 94(2), 228-267. https://doi.org/10.3102/00346543231171345

Reynolds, D., Rutherford-Quach, S., Cassidy, L., Jennerjohn, A., & Woodworth, K. (2025). Beyond the surface: Leveraging high-quality instructional materials for robust reading comprehension [Learning brief]. SRI. https://www.sri.com/publication/education-learning-pubs/beyond-the-surface-leveraging-high-quality-instructional-materials-for-robust-reading-comprehension/

Rice, M., Wijekumar, K., Lambright, K., & Bristow, A. (2024). Inferencing in reading comprehension: Examining variations in definition, instruction, and assessment. Technology, Knowledge and Learning, 29(3), 1169–1190. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10758-023-09660-y

Sedita, J. (2024 January 3). “In support of main idea and comprehension strategy instruction.” Keys to Literacy. https://keystoliteracy.com/blog/in-support-of-main-idea-and-comprehension-strategy-instruction/

Shanahan, T. (2023, December 2). Why main idea is not the main idea—or, how best to teach reading comprehension. Shanahan on Literacy. https://www.shanahanonliteracy.com/blog/why-main-idea-is-not-the-main-idea-or-how-best-to-teach-reading-comprehension

Stevens, E. A., Park, S., & Vaughn, S. (2019). A Review of Summarizing and Main Idea Interventions for Struggling Readers in Grades 3 Through 12: 1978–2016. Remedial and Special Education, 40(3), 131-149. https://doi.org/10.1177/0741932517749940

Willingham, D.T. (2006-2007). The usefulness of brief instruction in reading comprehension strategies. American Educator, 30(4), 39-45, 50. https://www.aft.org/ae/winter2006-2007/willingham

Zargar, E., Adams, A. M., & Connor, C. M. (2020). The relations between children's comprehension monitoring and their reading comprehension and vocabulary knowledge: An eye-movement study. Reading and Writing, 33, 511–545. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11145-019-09966-3