Reading to Understand — Checklist to Unlock the Elements of Comprehension

Use this checklist to guide educators and students in building robust reading comprehension skills grounded in the science of reading. Check items as they are implemented and adapt to your classroom context.

Classroom Planning & Instruction

•  Define clear comprehension goals for each unit (e.g., infer meaning, summarize, evaluate arguments).

•  Align texts, questions, and tasks to grade-level standards and students’ background knowledge.

•  Sequence instruction from explicit modeling → guided practice → independent practice.

•  Teach a balanced mix of text types (narrative, informational, technical, persuasive) and complexity levels.

•  Plan scaffolds (pre-teaching vocabulary, background knowledge, text frames) that you can fade over time.

•  Schedule regular sustained silent reading and structured close reading sessions.

Explicit Teaching of Comprehension Strategies

•  Model and teach specific strategies (predicting, questioning, clarifying, summarizing, visualizing).

•  Teach metacognitive strategies: “I do / We do / You do” think‑alouds that reveal the teacher’s thinking.

•  Teach text structure awareness (e.g., cause/effect, problem/solution, compare/contrast, chronological).

•  Teach inference-making explicitly: how to combine text clues with background knowledge.

•  Teach how to identify main idea and supporting details across genres.

•  Practice paraphrasing and summarizing with sentence frames and gradual release.

Vocabulary & Language Instruction

•  Pre-teach critical academic and domain-specific vocabulary before reading complex texts.

•  Teach multiple word-learning strategies (morphology, context clues, dictionaries).

•  Integrate vocabulary into speaking and writing activities for deeper processing.

•  Teach syntax and grammar elements that support comprehension (complex sentences, connectors).

Background Knowledge & Content Building

•  Activate prior knowledge with quick surveys, K-W-L charts, or short multimedia introductions.

•  Build domain knowledge through content-rich instruction and cross-curricular planning.

•  Provide visual supports (timelines, maps, concept maps) to situate new information.

Questioning & Discussion

•  Use a range of text-dependent questions: literal, inferential, evaluative.

•  Teach students how to construct high-quality questions about text.

•  Structure collaborative talk (think-pair-share, literature circles, Socratic seminars) with clear norms and roles.

•  Require evidence-based responses: use sentence stems like “The text says…, which shows…”

•  Model and practice citing textual evidence to support claims.

Assessment & Progress Monitoring

•  Use formative checks (exit tickets, quick writes, comprehension probes) to gauge understanding frequently.

•  Use running records and miscues to identify comprehension breakdowns (not just decoding issues).

•  Analyze student errors to tailor small-group instruction and interventions.

•  Set measurable comprehension targets and track growth over time.

Differentiation & Small-Group Instruction

•  Group students by instructional need for targeted strategy instruction.

•  Provide tiered texts and tasks so all students access the same core ideas at appropriate complexity.

•  Use guided reading and strategy groups to model, scaffold, and practice specific comprehension skills.

•  Offer extra supports (audio versions, pre-teaching, graphic organizers) for students with limited decoding or language skills.

Instructional Materials & Tools

•  Use high-quality, culturally responsive texts that reflect diverse perspectives and experiences.

•  Provide annotated exemplars and text-dependent task templates.

•  Use graphic organizers (story maps, cause/effect charts, T-charts) for different comprehension aims.

•  Incorporate multimedia (videos, images, audio) to support comprehension and background knowledge.

Writing to Learn & Response to Text

•  Use short written responses (summaries, evidence-based claims) to check comprehension and practice synthesis.

•  Teach how to transform comprehension into writing: note-taking, outlines, argumentative and explanatory writing from texts.

•  Use text-based projects (presentations, posters, explainers) that require comprehension and synthesis.

Language for Thinking & Academic Talk

•  Teach academic sentence frames and discourse markers (e.g., “According to the author…,” “This implies…”).

•  Model and practice reasoning language for making inferences and explaining evidence.

•  Encourage sustained student-to-student dialogue where comprehension is co-constructed.

Motivation, Engagement & Classroom Culture

•  Build choice into reading selections to increase engagement and ownership.

•  Create a classroom culture that values curiosity, questioning, and rereading as normal parts of comprehension.

•  Celebrate growth in comprehension with student portfolios and reflective conferences.

Supports for Students with Reading Difficulties & Multilingual Learners

•  Coordinate decoding/phonics intervention with comprehension instruction — both matter.

•  Provide pre-teaching and repetition of critical concepts and vocabulary.

•  Use bilingual supports and cognate instruction where appropriate.

•  Break tasks into smaller steps with clear success criteria and visual supports.

Professional Learning & Collaboration

•  Engage in regular professional learning on the science of reading and evidence-based comprehension practices.

•  Share lesson routines, text sets, and strategy resources with colleagues.

•  Observe peers and coach for effective think-alouds, questioning, and scaffolding techniques.

•  Use data meetings to discuss student comprehension patterns and instructional adjustments.

Reflection & Continuous Improvement

•  Collect student artifacts (notes, summaries, assessments) to reflect on instructional impact.

•  Solicit student feedback on which strategies help them understand texts.

•  Iterate lesson designs based on assessment data and classroom observation.

•  Set short-cycle improvement goals (2–6 week) for targeted comprehension practices.

Use this checklist to plan, teach, and refine comprehension-focused instruction. For curriculum planning, convert checklist items into a short-term action plan (who, when, how you’ll implement each item) and track outcomes.