With the schools’ greatest successes in reading achievement coming at the third-grade level, no one can deny the well-defined requirement of a kid mastering the skills of reading comprehension at a state and the national level. This trend has started to make its way into the world of teaching in the fourth grade and continues to creep in through the high school years slowly. Unfortunately, although it has proven to be one of the significant teaching elements, it hardly improves and only barely levels off.
It has left many concerned parents asking the same question again and again. That is, “why does the achievement show deterioration after the third grade?”. The answer actually can be located in “reading comprehension.”
The Significance Of Reading Comprehension
Throughout the third grade, reading instructions mostly focus on applying mechanics and concrete content. However, after passing third grade, the focus shifts, and one may find that the emphasis has shifted towards reading comprehension while the content becomes increasingly more conceptual. With it, one has to note that the drop in the achievement rate after the third grade continues to become more and more obvious among those students belonging to the lower socio-economic classes.
Then, How To Improve Reading Comprehension?
If you think it can be improved by reading more, you are wrong. The issue is not the lack of exposure but the lack of appropriate intellectual abilities and a comprehensive set of concepts. These are impedimental elements that hinder one from having more advanced reading comprehension. Cognition and memory are situated at the Units, Classes, and Relations level. With this, basic reading can be sustained. So, a student only needs to develop the following abilities to become a competent reader.
- Cognition of semantic Units for basic vocabulary.
- Cognition of semantic Classes is needed to organize the vocabulary conceptually.
- Cognition of Semantic Relations is needed to relate the basic vocabulary units.
- The memory of semantic units, relations, and classes is needed to recall the basics.
By the time an individual manages to fulfill the requirement of the mechanics of the reading, then the individual would have covered almost everything to perform advanced reading comprehension. Comprehensive reading is dramatically widespread and has reached the threshold of intellectual demands. With it, one can say that the content has become more complex and extensive.
Intellectual Requirements:
Once the students leave the barrier created by the basic reading, the content would alter dramatically. For example, the simple lines would continue to a paragraph. In contrast, unending chapters will switch paragraphs. These changes require a controlled intellectual ability to decode such lengthy information. At the same time, some students have mastered the abilities without having any formal training. However, some require assistance to process the advanced reading material. Hence, in terms of intellect abilities, they require the following.
- Evaluation: it is the ability to deal with uncertainty as well as ambiguity
- Convergent production: It is the ability to follow the rules and solve problems.
- System: it is the ability to deal with the complexity that comes with relations.
- Implications: It is the capacity that allows one to see multiple outcomes as well as consequences
- Transformation: The mastery over which one can see content from a different viewpoint
These abilities will assist in meeting the content demands of comprehensive reading.
Ending note
Those students who have not yet mastered these abilities are the ones who need assistance via an SOI learning abilities class. These training sessions look forward to building the basics of reading comprehension and moving forward to achieve the advanced required skill of a child.
