11 Proven Tips to Improve Reading Comprehension Skills for Students

Some school-based leaders will advocate for all their teachers and instructors to
teach and instruct state or provincial-based diploma testing and for the best test
percentage results to make the school look good.

Are the students taught and focused on strategies to improve their understanding
and fluency of literature, reading, and writing?

Thankfully, very few, an extreme minority of school-based leaders are concerned
about the multiple-choice reading comprehension tests as the determinant of
student understanding of fluency in reading and writing within English literature. 

A supervisor asked me why some students are doing much better in their reading
comprehension... with the teacher using a multiple, complex, compound sentence
question with at least two answer sentences from students... instead of multiple
choice question and click and select answer.

On the other hand, multiple choice questions are extremely limited to assessing
student understanding of literature related to their reading and writing fluency.

There are hundreds of research articles on improving and evaluating students'
understanding of reading comprehension without multiple-choice question
quizzes to assess the student's knowledge of literature, reading fluency, and
writing fluency.

Here are just a few strategies to improve student reading comprehension:

• Build on existing knowledge
• Identify and summarize key ideas
• Use online resources
• Use visual aids
• Develop vocabulary skills
• Implement thinking strategies
• Create question-and-answer scenarios
• Encourage reciprocal teaching
• Use summarizing techniques
• Ask students to make predictions
• Try making inferences

The research shows multiple choice questions related to reading comprehension
of literature have many facets and complexities. Student understanding and
success are not based on 100% multiple-choice questions for student understanding.

In other words, study the above list and research the articles/papers...

There is a reason why SATs, ACTs, LSATs, and government exams are not
considered 100% foolproof for students' reading fluency and writing fluency. 

Please, compare student understanding of literature via multiple choice quizzes/tests
to types of assignments - PowerPoints, short multiple sentence answers to reading
comprehension questions, blog posts, online articles, literary essays, research papers,
and book reviews. Do multiple choice question quizzes/exams become the 100%
assessment of student understanding and fluency output?

Multiple choice questions are minuscule for High School, college, and university
students' understanding and growth in reading and writing fluency. 

Should we focus on multiple-choice questions and answers and student scores,
especially for English literature?

Or, should we develop outstanding analytical readers of literature and extremely
well written fluent writers?