Reading Comprehension
Reading Comprehension is how well you grasp and recall what you read.
A glass of juice sits on a tray with layers of pulp at the bottom. You can sip the top and miss the pulp below, or stir it all and taste the full mix. Reading the words is like sipping the top — you see them but may miss the meaning. Grasping the full idea means stirring all the layers in your mind.
Explaining reading comprehension by grade level
When you read a story, you think about what happens. You try to understand the words. You can retell the story to a friend. That shows you understood it. Good readers ask themselves what a story is about as they read.
Projects that explore reading comprehension
How well you grasp what you read may depend on how that information reaches you — through your eyes or through your ears. Ten participants read a comprehension passage for 30 minutes, then answer 50 questions. The next day, they listen to a different passage of equal difficulty for the same amount of time and answer another 50 questions. When the scores are compared, the listening scores come out higher for both boys and girls.
How well you grasp printed text can shift based on something as simple as ink color. Twenty participants read the same essays printed in four colors: black, red, blue, and green. Each person reads one essay per color and answers 10 questions afterward. Black text produces the highest scores. Green text produces the lowest. The gap between the two is more than 20 points out of 100.