How to improve reading comprehension? Best practices

Reading comprehension is one of the more critical aspects of learning and reading skills in general. Learning how to improve reading comprehension comes from practice and time. It helps with gaining new knowledge and starts best when learning at a young age. Reading comprehension helps to teach students everything from complete understanding to standardized tests.

It also helps to encourage students to learn from elementary school all through higher education. Developing the right reading strategies and how students read early on helps with memory skills. It also helps to build background knowledge and new vocabulary words. It will also help with their verbal and written communication skills.

Reading comprehension skills require practice and patience, especially a child’s reading comprehension. And yes, you can improve your reading comprehension as well. Yet first, let’s look at reading comprehension so you can describe it in your own words.

Is it possible to improve comprehension?

Yes, and we need to encourage reading comprehension. There are several strategies to help teach students better comprehension strategies. Strategies to improve reading come from basic teaching methods. It all starts with students reading their regular books. Yet reading strategies for comprehension require just a bit more.

Reading aloud is a great way of starting out as it’s a form of audio learning. It helps students who are struggling with reading comprehension to get to an understanding in manageable chunks. Reading out loud key words will help to decipher word meaning. It will also help give confidence and encourage students to be able to learn.

Yet part of that is to provide reading material that is at the right reading skill. There’s no point in having a student read aloud if they aren’t at the correct stage. Students learn new vocabulary through reading at the appropriate grade levels, and it helps to have them do re-reading when the time comes to study. Having all these new words and vocabulary to deal with helps students build out important concepts as well.

Rereading is important because it reinforces practice and fluency. If students are not talking, they can write down words that don’t make sense. Later on, they can decode words and what the word means. Doing it in written form helps only to reinforce the overall learning.

Comprehension strategies are never-ending

Reading comprehension isn’t something that is ever truly done. It’s all about the concept of building background knowledge and memory skills. Ongoing reading practice will teach students context clues. Context clues lead to word recognition and eventually lead to expanded vocabulary knowledge. This allows students to hone their comprehension strategies and reading comprehension skills.

Reading and comprehension skills are also best done in a group setting or with a facilitator. The group environment allows for a larger pool of prior knowledge and background knowledge. It expands the vocabulary knowledge and the variety of their own words.

In a group setting, it also has more people offer up context clues and help with unfamiliar words. A certain level of confidence grows when a group is deciphering those unfamiliar words. Not only will you improve your reading comprehension, but it will also encourage students there to improve.

You’re not just talking about expanding vocabulary words to teach students but diving into the reading process itself. Whether in elementary, middle, or high school, ask about the main idea of the reading. See what the key points or supporting details of the reading are. What is their text comprehension? Who is the main character? List of main points to review to better understand the words and the reading selection itself.

Reading comprehension skills lead to critical thinking

Reading is not just about being verbose with an extensive vocabulary. The learning concepts of reading and decoding words or pairing prior knowledge to the relevant content is laying the foundation. These comprehension skills are part of the foundation for critical thinking, which is powerful throughout life. It focuses on deduction skills and looking at problems from different angles. It takes your memory skill, background knowledge, comprehension skills, and reading to help strengthen critical thinking.

It helps you make emotionless and rational choices that are completely objective. Those context clues you were looking for in reading comprehension also apply to critical thinking. It also helps down the line to improve reading comprehension because you’ll get the key ideas faster. This leads to a deep understanding of the material read, not just reading for vocabulary words.

How to enhance reading comprehension skills?

Now that you see the importance of growing your reading skills, it’s time for some comprehension tips. First, you want to consider reciprocal teaching, meaning that as you learn, you also learn to teach your knowledge. Then you always want to do reading comprehension with written communication and note-taking. This helps to organize your thoughts.

At the same time, you want to be able to incorporate other concepts. Mind maps are great graphic organizers for your written communications. You can write everything down with a pen on paper, but online resources are available to help. Having graphic organizers that you can easily edit and share will greatly improve reusability and competence.

Education mind maps also play a key role. Mind map examples for students include a bubble map with a centralized concept. Students learn to grow their vocabulary through these bubble maps. It also helps to connect key ideas as well as learn new words at the same time.

Use mind map software and reading skills combined

Visual diagrams are a versatile tool, and they can help you in many cases. There are so many mind map uses, and improving reading comprehension is one of them. A great online mind map tool option is Mindomo which allows you to create digital mind maps with ease.

There’s plenty of flexibility to help with reading and reading comprehension. You can take all the reading comprehension strategies and combine them with the mind mapping technique for the best results.

Before you know it, you’ll improve your reading comprehension, critical thinking, and mind map skills. This is one of the many strategies to improve reading for middle school students, and it also helps high school and adults on improving their reading skills and understanding.

Mindomo has many mind map templates you can use in education in general, and you can also start creating a diagram from scratch. Here are a few template examples you can use while reading books: