Using ADI in the K - 2 Classroom to Increase Reading Comprehension

An interview with Dr. Victor Sampson, Creator of the Argument-Driven Inquiry instructional model and Professor at the University of Texas, Austin

Interviewer: What are the key components that schools need to focus on to improve students' reading abilities?

Dr. Sampson: Schools have been focusing on improving reading scores for several years. Kids have to master three parts to read.

The first skill is decoding, which phonics is especially helpful for. We've seen a lot of success in schools in figuring out the decoding piece of understanding symbols to sounds. From there, you go to fluency, where you can string those sounds together in a way that you can actually hear a word and have a sentence that's not all choppy and difficult to understand. Fluency doesn't seem to be a problem either, from scores on fluency such as fast reads and things like that.

What happens is that we go to comprehension, which is understanding what you read, and that's where we're falling down and not able to move the needle. Comprehension requires someone to know the content that they're reading about so they can actually understand what they're reading. And all of our school tests use science and social studies content to test comprehension.

The problem is it's a whole other language that no one's ever seen. So if kids haven't been reading and thinking about that content, when they come across words like thermometer, terrarium, mass or any number of things that are used in this content, they don't understand what they're being asked about. So they can read the word, they can say it out loud, they can do it fluently, they just don't comprehend what they're reading.

Understanding context clues alone doesn't solve the problem. It's a content issue. So, you need programs that give kids opportunities to read and learn content just as much as you learn to decode or read fluently or any number of other things.

And 20 minutes a week of science doesn't do it. And it's not reading just about butterflies either. Instead, it's reading to find information. So when you're trying to figure something out in science, you're looking up information and reading about that and pulling what's important. And that's the skill they need to develop.