Teaching for transfer can help young children read for understanding

Abstract

To make progress in improving students’ reading comprehension, we need to rethink the very nature of reading comprehension — it’s not a skill and it requires background knowledge. James Kim and Mary Burkhauser explain that, to help students apply what they learn from one reading task to another reading task, educators should consider developing thematic lessons that organize knowledge around a schema, help students connect new knowledge to a schema, and measure students’ ability to transfer knowledge to novel comprehension tasks. They encourage educators to consider how they might use their knowledge of the role of schemas in reading comprehension to improve children’s ability to read for understanding.