Improving Quality of Learning: Reading Comprehension Skills Report

This report delves into the critical role of reading comprehension in enhancing the quality of learning and boosting academic achievement. It explores how building comprehensive skills and retention strategies can significantly improve student outcomes, differentiating between active and passive readers. The report discusses the importance of comprehension strategies, including monitoring understanding, metacognition, and the use of graphic organizers, and question-answer relationships. It also evaluates the obstacles students face, such as decoding difficulties and a lack of active engagement with text. The report suggests solutions like exciting students about reading, setting reading goals, and asking questions about the text. The conclusion emphasizes the long-term benefits of reading comprehension skills, their impact on personal and professional lives, and the need for educators to identify and address specific reading problems, using various assessment tools and strategies to help students interact with and understand the material more effectively.

Individual Report

Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION...........................................................................................................................3
Discuss the role of building comprehensive and retention in improving quality of learning and
increase academic achievement of students ...............................................................................3
Evaluate the obstacles pertaining to building comprehension and retention .............................3
Draw conclusions based on the key points ..............................................................................3
REFERENCES ...............................................................................................................................4
Reference.........................................................................................................................................5

INTRODUCTION
Reading comprehension skills differentiate passive unskilled reader from the active
readers. The students who are good readers, they do not just read but they interact with the text.
A beginning reader can be provided help by making them privy for dialogue readers. The
following assignment includes role of building comprehensive and retention in order to improve
quality of learning. This includes obstacles pertaining to building comprehension and retention.
Discuss the role of building comprehensive and retention in improving quality of learning and
increase academic achievement of students
Reading is defined as skill for many individuals that is taken for granted. This is an act of
comprehending in a proper way and this is a complex and interactive process. This needs
different brain functions for working together and there is requirement of one to puzzle by
multiple layers of context and meaning (Just and Carpenter, 2018). The reading comprehension
is so complicated, the person finds it difficult in basic interpretation of text. Comprehension
strategies are conscious plans which are set of steps which are needed by good readers and
students for making proper use of it in texts. Comprehension strategy instructions helps in
becoming purposeful, active readers who are in control of their own reading comprehension. The
seven strategies are present and these have research based evidence in order to improve text
comprehension. The monitoring of comprehension is much needed. Students who are good in
monitoring their comprehension know when they understand what they read and when they are
not reading. These students are having strategies for fixing problems in their understanding as
the problem increases (Stanley Petscher and Catts, 2018). According to a research, there are
instruction in the early grades and this can help students in besoming better at monitoring
comprehension. The monitoring of comprehension instruction teaches students for knowing the
following things -
 Becoming aware of what are they doing
 identifying what are they understanding
 Using appropriate strategies for resolving problems in comprehension
Meta cognition is defined as thinking about thinking. Good readers and students use this strategy
for thinking about and having control over reading. There mus be clarification of purpose before
reading and previewing the text. When the student is reading, there is need of monitoring the

understanding, adjusting the reading speed for fitting the difficulty of text and then fixing any
comprehension problem. After the reading is done, there is checking of understanding of what
they read (Yu and et. al., 2018). Students can use different comprehension monitoring strategies
including identification of difficulty occurrence, identification of what the difficulty is and
restating the difficult sentence or passage in own words.
The graphic organisers illustrates concept and relationships between concepts in a text
and diagrams. These are known by different names such as webs, maps, frames, charts, clusters,
etc. The graphic organisers can help in readers for focusing on concepts and how are they related
to the concepts. The graphic organisers helps students in reading and understanding picture
books and textbooks. The graphic organisers can help students for focusing on text structure
differences between non fiction and fiction (Kočiský et. al., 2018). This provides students with
tools which are used for examining and showing relationship in a text. This is helpful for
students in writing well structured summaries for any text. The question answer relationship
strat6egy is helpful for students as it encourages students for learning how to answer questions in
a better manner. The students are asked for indicating whether information they are using for
answering question regarding text was explicit information. The different kinds of question can
be asked for enhancing knowledge of the student. These questions includes right there, think &
search, Author & you and on your own. The generation of questions helps students in becoming
aware of whether it is answering the questions and if they understand what are they reading.
Students are able to learn by asking themselves questions required for combining information
from different segments of text. This can be explained with an example, students are taught for
asking questions about ideas and how this idea can relate to important information of the text.
Evaluate the obstacles pertaining to building comprehension and retention
The main problem while reading comprehension is that students lack the strategies for
actively engaging with text so that they can understand it. Some of the strategies that prove to be
challenging consists of decoding the words and making interferences. This creates difficulty for
students in understanding the concept of what are they reading. According to the research, it is
concluded that explicit teaching of strategies helps in improving cooperative learning. This
includes students working together as partners and in small groups which has a clear objective or
goal. The cooperative learning instruction is used successfully for teaching comprehension
strategies. There are following ways of improving student's reading comprehension -

Exciting child about reading and helping them making connections to the story – At
the time of reading, there is no need of directly going to story. The teachers must excite students
for reading by activating the background knowledge of the story (Hebert, Zhang and Parrila,
2018.). After this, there is need of recalling what students already know about the topic
mentioned in the story. This helps in enabling them to connect better towards reading and
increasing level of reducing comprehension.
Decoding difficulties can hinder reading comprehension – There is no need of reading a
complex text when the student is unable to comprehend it. There is a lot of effort used for
decoding words in a text. This is likely that student is not understanding whatever he or she is
writing. There are some scholastics who recommend to use five finger rule. When there are more
than five words on a page, it is provided that whole story is told to students.
Setting reading goals – As per the reading rockets, there is a good reader who will set his
or her goals before reading. It is clarified that what is the main aim of reading the text and how to
analyse the story.
Ask questions about the text – It is important for students to know how to ask questions
regarding the text. This helps in encouraging students to think about the way of reading. These
questions must consist of what are the reasons for a character for choosing to do that. Such
questions help in encouraging reader for actively looking for answers as he or she reads along.
This helps in facilitating reading comprehension.
Practise makes perfect – The best way for helping students with comprehension reading
is to work continuously with student using the strategies mentioned above. The students must be
given effective reading so that they will get more effective knowledge.
Draw conclusions based on the key points
From the above discussion, it is analysed that reading comprehension skills are helpful in
increasing pleasure and effectiveness of reading. These skills are helpful in personal and
professional lives of individuals. The building reading comprehension skills needs a long term
strategy and in this all reading skills areas are contributing to success. The reading
comprehension skills becomes automatic and skilled readers forget that they have to develop
reading comprehension skill. The main aim for teaching reading comprehension is to develop
habit of interacting with text and monitoring an individual's understanding. The evaluation of
reading comprehension can provide information to educators and helping them to develop

effective strategies. In this way, students are helped with reading comprehension problems.
Typical strategies focuses on using mediated reading, pre reading tasks, graphic organising,
improving comprehension and retention. The teachers use assessment information for identifying
the specific type of reading problem that a student is having. They have to choose strategies for
correcting problems. The comprehension in reading means understanding what is read. There are
many students who are strong and in recognising words in print. They do not understand
difference between main character and someone who is present for interaction. Students must
possess these reading skills for understanding the in depth knowledge of concept or topic.
Students are able to read beyond to the text and finding it's meaning. This helps to enhance
knowledge and the clarification of different concepts and topics.

REFERENCES
Books and Journals
Just, M. A. and Carpenter, P. A., 2018. Using eye fixations to study reading comprehension.
In New methods in reading comprehension research (pp. 151-182). Routledge.
Stanley, C. T., Petscher, Y. and Catts, H., 2018. A longitudinal investigation of direct and indirect
links between reading skills in kindergarten and reading comprehension in tenth
grade. Reading and Writing. 31(1). pp.133-153.
Yu, A.W and et. al., 2018. Qanet: Combining local convolution with global self-attention for
reading comprehension. arXiv preprint arXiv:1804.09541.
Kočiský, T et. al., 2018. The narrativeqa reading comprehension challenge. Transactions of the
Association for Computational Linguistics. 6. pp.317-328.
Hebert, M., Zhang, X. and Parrila, R., 2018. Examining reading comprehension text and question
answering time differences in university students with and without a history of reading
difficulties. Annals of dyslexia. 68(1). pp.15-24.