Very little comprehension instruction

At about the same time, Dolores Durkin observed reading instruction in fourth-grade classrooms over the course of a school year. For many student readers, fourth grade is a transition year from “learning to read” to “reading to learn.” In a 1979 article, Durkin reported that there was very little comprehension instruction in the classrooms. Teachers assigned questions and told students about content. But in seventy-five hours of reading instruction Durkin observed that year, teachers devoted only twenty minutes, less than 1 percent of the time, to teaching readers how to comprehend and learn new information from reading. Her studies and the others cited above anticipated an intense interest in helping students learn strategies to comprehend and learn from reading.