The Beautiful (and Impossible) Dream of Transferable Reading Skills

A tiny excerpt from The Teach Like a Champion Guide to the Science of Reading

One of the themes of Middlemarch, George Eliott’s classic nineteenth-century novel, is Mr. Casaubon’s fruitless pursuit of a concept he refers to as “the key to all mythologies.” A scholar, he imagines a single understanding that will illuminate the true meaning of every tale. He spends his life toiling at the task of finding this universal key.

It’s hopeless, of course. The novel reveals his delusions. When he dies, his once-admiring wife, Dorothea, at last reads his papers and can see that the project was absurd from the start, but the reality proved all but impossible to acknowledge because the dream was so beautiful. It was a “chimera,” something so alluring the believer desperately wants it to exist even when the facts are saying it cannot be so.

The belief in transferable skills is perhaps the most common chimera among teachers of reading. Imagine a handful of universal tools we could teach students and in so doing enable them to understand every text they read. Who wouldn’t seek out “the key to all inferences,” for example, knowing that once mastered this skill would allow our students to unlock what was unspoken in every story? Or the “key to main ideas,” which would enable them after a bit of diligent study to grasp the gist of any passage for the rest of their lives. Who among us would not dream such a beautiful dream?

The problem is that for all the beauty of the dream, the evidence is squarely against it. Beyond a bare minimum amount, “Practice brings no benefit to reading-comprehension strategy use,” Daniel Willingham writes. Summarizing the finding of recent studies, he writes that beyond a very small amount of brief explanation, “There was no evidence that increasing instructional time for comprehension strategies—even by 400 percent!—brought any benefit.”

Take inferences, for example. While we make inferences constantly while reading, and while doing so clearly assists with comprehension, practicing strategies like making inferences doesn’t help much and there’s no evidence that the ability to make inferences well transfers from one book to another. “People don’t decide that they’re going to make these inferences, the mind just makes them happen,” Willingham says. The reason for this is that our ability to inference is a function of our prior knowledge.

The knowledge enables the inference. This is an inconvenient fact. It means we can’t just explain and practice and have students get better at inferencing. There is no Casaubon-like short cut. We instead have to go the long way around and make sure students have the background knowledge they need to make better sense of what they read.

As Dylan Wiliam writes in Creating the Schools Our Children Need, “The big mistake we have made in the United States is to assume that if we want students to be able to think, then our curriculum should give our students lots of practice thinking. This is a mistake because what our students need is more to think with.”

A classic study by Donna Recht and Lauren Leslie, known as “The Baseball Study,” demonstrates this. The authors divided sixty-four seventh- and eighth-grade students into two groups based on their reading levels: weak readers and strong readers. But they also divided those groups again, based on whether the students knew a lot about baseball. Now they had four groups: good readers who knew a lot about baseball and good readers who knew very little about baseball; weak readers who knew a lot about baseball and weak readers who knew very little about baseball.

They gave them a passage to read. Here are the first few lines:

Churniak swings and hits a slow bouncing ball toward the shortstop. Haley comes in, fields it, and throws to first, but too late. Churniak is on first with a single …

After students read the passage, the researchers tested the four groups of students to see how much of the passage they understood. Some of the results were exactly what you’d expect:

The students with high reading ability and strong knowledge of baseball had no trouble with the passage. They got almost all of the answers correct. By contrast, the weak readers with weak knowledge of baseball really struggled. They got less than half the questions right, scoring little above the level you’d expect them to get if they were merely guessing.

The surprise was in the two middle groups. The students with low reading ability but strong knowledge of baseball did better than the high-ability readers with little knowledge of baseball. Quite a lot better in fact—they were a few points behind the top group and scored almost 30 percent better than the students who were “better” readers but knew less about the topic of the passage.

It’s a study that has been repeated with students reading about different topics, and it demonstrates quite elegantly that you read well and successfully when and because you have background knowledge of what you are reading about. To return to Dylan Wiliam’s point: if we want students to understand and think more deeply about what they read we should focus on knowledge and not waste time trying to teach them abstract skills like making inferences or finding the main idea.

The reason why this is the case has to do with what you might call the inherent ambiguity of every text. As Daniel Willingham recently pointed out, every sentence is to some degree ambiguous. An author never tells you everything. If he or she did, reading would be incredibly tedious and meaning making would become nearly impossible.

Authors by necessity always make assumptions about what readers know and assume they will fill in gaps. This is always true, even when they aren’t deliberately leaving blanks and ambiguities for stylistic or artistic reasons. Understanding any text always involves “disambiguating” it.

Here’s a very short text, the ambiguities of which make an interesting case study:

The wooden box was massive. She placed her bear on the ground. It was going to be hard to carry.

The ambiguities are probably not even apparent to you at first because you resolved them simply and easily with inferences you didn’t know you made. One ambiguity is that her “bear” is not a real bear but a teddy bear. There’s no way she’d be carrying a real bear. As a result you probably inferred that “she” was a child. Another ambiguity involves resolving what noun the pronoun “it” refers in the second sentence. Grammatically it’s just as plausible for it to refer to the teddy bear as the box. But you knew that it referred to the box. It doesn’t make sense for a teddy bear to be hard to carry but a massive wooden box, yes. Especially for a child. You disambiguated because you had knowledge—the weights of common things, that someone with a teddy bear is probably a child—that the author assumed you would have.

But what if the author assumes you know something you don’t? Like in this sentence:

For pudding she allowed herself some cake.

If you’re a reader in England, where “pudding” means roughly the same thing as “dessert” does to an American, the sentence is easily disambiguated. She ordered cake after dinner. It was a small indulgence. This is implied by the phrase “she allowed herself.”

But if you lack that background knowledge, the sentence is nonsensical, even if you are a very good reader.

Your working memory is busy wrestling with what seems like a riddle—for pudding she had cake? How could she have cake for pudding? Does the author mean “instead of pudding” maybe? (If you are English imagine the sentence “For custard she had cake” to get the general sense for how an American might experience the text.) You not only failed to understand the first part, you might not have even noticed or perceived the subtle implications of the word allowed, which tells you quite a bit about the “she” in the sentence and the small indulgence of permitting herself a piece of cake that perhaps she wouldn’t ordinarily consider: perhaps she is conscious of her weight, perhaps she is conscious of money. When your working memory is overloaded wrestling with something you don’t immediately understand, your perceptiveness of other details is also degraded. Meaning is interrupted everywhere. There is no “story” in the sentence for readers who don’t have background knowledge about what “pudding” means.

Comprehension, this is to say, is knowledge-based. We make better inferences, we perceive more, we have working memory to think more deeply, when we know more about what the author assumes we know enough about. We can’t do those things when we don’t have this knowledge.

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