The seven most effective reading comprehension strategies for Years 3–6 — evidence-based and practically implemented.
Reading comprehension research has identified a small number of strategies that make a significant, measurable difference to children's comprehension. This page summarises the seven most effective, with guidance on how to implement them at KS2. These strategies are recommended by the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) and Ofsted's 2019 reading review.
Prediction keeps readers actively engaged and encourages thinking about narrative structure and character motivation. Making predictions — and then verifying or revising them — builds inference skills.
Good readers notice when they do not understand something and take action. Poor readers often read through confusion without registering it. Teaching clarifying means building metacognitive awareness.
Generating questions while reading keeps readers actively engaged. Having children generate their own questions is particularly powerful.
Creating mental images of what a text describes improves both comprehension and memory. It requires processing language meaning, not just decoding.
Summarising requires distinguishing main ideas from details, understanding text structure and constructing meaning from the whole. It is assessed directly in KS2 SATs.
Children understand new texts much better when they can connect them to what they already know.
Discussing texts in groups — sharing interpretations, challenging reasoning, building on each other's ideas — is consistently one of the most powerful comprehension strategies.
Research identifies explicit instruction in multiple strategies simultaneously as most effective — more so than any single strategy alone. The EEF recommends teaching comprehension strategies as an integrated package.
Each strategy maps directly to SATs domains. Prediction develops 2e. Summarising is assessed in 2c. Inference (combining most strategies) underpins 2d. Language analysis develops 2g.