Executive Functioning and Reading Comprehension in the Classroom

Some students struggle with reading because they have trouble with decoding. Then there are other students who can decode but struggle with comprehension. This post is going to discuss some things to keep in mind and tips for working with students who may struggle with reading due to executive functioning issue. These are the students who struggle with fully understanding a text because the impact of executive functioning and reading comprehension.

The overall goal of reading is to comprehend the author’s message. Unfortunately students with weak executive functioning skills might struggle to comprehend the author’s message because they are confused or focused on the wrong things while they read.

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Executive Functioning and Reading Comprehension

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Here is a quick overview of the various executive functions that are involved in reading.

Planning & Organization- This includes the ability to create a road map to reach a goal. Completing tasks requires the ability to have a mental plan in place so things get done. Students who read 20 minutes consistently every night are the ones who are organized enough to remember to bring their silent reading book home each day and they prioritize a time to read instead of letting the evening disappear with other tasks.

Working Memory– This is holding things in mind while doing something else. Dr. Russell Barkley calls this your brain’s GPS system, one that keeps you on track, on time and in control. When working memory is effective at its job, it is able to determine the relevance of new information and help alter the plan if needed. To someone that struggles with executive functioning, this can unfortunately become a hot mess. In reading, working memory is what allows us to integrate information as we continue on in a story or text.

Cognitive Flexibility– This is described as seeing things from multiple perspectives and to modify perspectives as needed. It includes moving from individual word reading to understanding meaning, considering various meanings of words, adjusting a reader’s point of view as we read new information, switching letter sounds like the ch sounds in ‘choose’ vs ‘chaos’

Self Regulation- Think about the students who struggle in this area when silent reading. When we silently read, we typically need to sit still. There is a significant amount of effort involved in sitting still while also trying to focus on reading a book. Many students who struggle with self-control might also think that to read well is to read fast, causing these students to race through books, compromising their understanding of the text. Unfortunately the idea of timed oral reading can continue to emphasize a student’s thinking that fast = good. Some students aren’t even aware that they need to make meaning from the sounds they are saying.

Social Understanding – How well do our students understand the minds of other people? How well can they infer? The ability to infer while reading has a major impact in our continuous adjustment of an author’s meaning. If students can’t do this well, students will really struggle to independently read with success.

What Executive Functioning Skills Do Good Readers Use?

Good readers are good thinkers. This includes:

Flexible thinkers- they can adjust with new information and adapt as a story moves on.
Good planners- they know why they are reading and make a plan to get there
Have good memories- can keep things in mind while doing other things
Organized thinkers- use what they know to remember what they read
Good at ignoring- they don’t pay attention to things that are not important to understanding including distractions in the room and unimportant words
Good mind readers- lots of social inferences and predict within reason, what characters will do

How Do We Help Our Struggling Readers with their Executive Functioning Skills While Reading?

To help our students who struggle with reading comprehension due to executive functioning we need to make invisible mental processes visible and provide concrete support.

I am a huge fan of using interactive notebooks when teaching reading. I think taking notes, cutting them out and gluing them into a notebook is an extremely tactile way to process and learning important information about any school subject. For my EF students, I will usually give them a color copy of the completed notes and all they have to do is cut and glue it into their notebook. This helps to save time and effort, since they will most likely struggle with all of the extra note taking steps.

Planning

Good readers know why they are reading and make a plan to get there. We can support struggling students through goal setting by teaching them steps they can take to reach their goal.

This includes explicit explanations and tools to make learning visible. Teachers should be intentional with what page they pause reading for the day. Try to find an exciting part to leave off, it will make resuming reading the next day easier to jump into. When breaking individual reading assignments by day, it is easier for students to plan/remember chapters to read instead of page numbers.

If I assign a reading from page 85-99, so many students are confused if they should stop at page 98, go on to 100 or stop at 99. What does reading to page 99 actually look like? This is why it is easier to finish chapter 7 instead of reading p. 85-99.

Vocabulary Challenges

It is important to think about the vocabulary expectations we have for our students. Multiple meaning words can be a nightmare for these students. Sometimes we expect students to learn academic meanings for words that have every day meaning (some- part vs. sum- total for example). Students struggle with ambiguous meaning of vocabulary and will not actively work toward correcting their misunderstanding.

You can support these readers by making them aware that there could be confusion in the vocabulary they are reading. They need the multiple meaning words pointed out to them and adjust their understanding of the text as they go.

Syntactic Awareness & Scrambled Sentences

Good readers are organized thinkers. They know how words, sentences and text are put together and use what they know to help them remember what they read. Students with comprehension challenges are usually not great at syntax.

Scrambled sentence activities are a good way to assess and practice syntactic awareness. Concrete supports in scrambled sentences include teaching the students to ask these questions in this order:

First look for the action word in the sentence.
Then ask, who did it? Usually this comes before the action word
How did they do it?
Who or what was it done to?
Where? This one usually goes at the end of the sentences.

Story Structure, Plot & Characters

Students that struggle with EF really struggle with understanding and retellings of stories. Often the retelling can sound like random events. Organization can be taught through explicitly teaching story structure using a cause/effect plot map.

Focus on discussing how events are causally connected. You can support these causal connections with explicit scaffolds of plot map. Providing this structure through the structure of the story helps students to make connections, which increases the overall understanding of a story.

Keeping a character tracker in fiction can help students to organize who is currently involved in the story and who we have met, but has stepped off the page for a while. The chances are high that students forget about characters we have met briefly only to return at the end of a story to play a major part, usually in an antagonist role. Telling students as you read a book, pay attention to this character, they go away for a while but you don’t want to forget about them, will help them have a better understanding of the story.

Teach Students to Identify Flashback in a Story

Flashback is used to give the reader important information about the past. Flashbacks help fill in missing information from a story and make current information make more sense.

The majority of a reading teacher’s time (when teaching flashback and foreshadowing) should be use guiding and helping students identify when the author is signaling that they are indeed reading a flashback.

If a student is not monitoring their comprehension as they read a story that is filled with flashback, the student could easily become confused and mixed up by the story. Authors will often signal with one word or a short phrase that the character is reliving a memory instead of currently experiencing the event in live time. So students who struggle with monitoring their comprehension will easily miss that what they are reading as a flashback in not, in fact, currently happening in the story.

Storytellers will share important information through flashback to help us as the reader/viewer understand a character’s actions. Flashback can also help develop the plot of the story.

Flashback is often used to highlight and understand

A character’s past traumatic event,
A backstory that conveys some pertinent background information
Some relevant intrusive thoughts that distract the character from the present moment.

Flashback will help us understand why someone who acts like a grumpy old man has become a grumpy old man (Carl, the old man, from Up). You can read more about teaching flashback here.

Text Structure

Text structure should be taught explicitly. I love to show students the visual differences between the way a text is organized if it is written as cause & effect vs. a chronological structure. Interestingly research shows that comprehension is shown to improve on both informational and narrative text when explicitly teaching text structure.

Lovin Lit has a great product on Teacher’s Pay Teachers I use every year that the students really enjoy. She does a fantastic job of making text structure visual. For example, when working on compare/contrast, students underline one topic in yellow, information about the other topic in blue and similar information about both topics in green. This really pops off the page and just makes sense for al the students, but especially the kids who struggle with executive functioning skills. There are a few different models of varying lengths, which is great for a variety of reading groups. I really like her passages on Disney World. I love that she has a sample text for each type of text structure. It is a highly engaging and visual way to dive into text structure and I often have success teaching text structure.

Pronouns

In addition to text structure, we also need to be explicit in discussing the way authors use shortcuts when writing. They don’t tell us, the reader, everything all the time. Authors will substitute shorter words or phrases for longer parts of the text. Students need to visualize what is going on in the text when pronouns get confusing.

Support students by highlighting a character’s actions with a specific highlighter color, making sure to not only highlight the character’s name, but also pronouns that are used for them. Highlighting dialogue can be helpful as well as author’s don’t always write who said what, we often have to infer who is speaking.

Identifying character’s specifically through color coding pronouns will helps student’s comprehension of the story. They will have a better idea of what is going on because they will have a better mental picture of who he, she or they are in specific paragraphs the student is reading.

Inferences

Students also need concrete visual support to help them see the whole picture when making inferences. Social understanding is key. Readers are required to understand why characters do what they do. Mapping stories from multiple perspectives helps the reader to understand at a deeper level. This supports students becoming mind readers and social inference making.

I have found a lot of really great materials that are made by Speech and Language Therapists for inferences on TPT in the area. SLPs do a great job making the invisible mental process of making inferences more visible.

Teaching With a Mountain View on TPT has a product I use every year. Making Inferences Task Cards has a scaffolded support with inferences that have pictures and others that just have questions. I typically start with the pictures as it provides visual support for my struggling students.

The Goal of Reading and Executive Functioning

Remember the overall goal of reading is to comprehend the author’s message. Students who struggle with executive functioning have many areas that may get them off track. Hopefully some of these tips will help.

If you are interested in reading more about Executive Functioning and school/reading check out these books:

Executive Skills and Reading Comprehension– I attended a conference presented by Kelly Cartwright through the International Literacy Association. It was really interesting and she had a lot of new tips to share for these struggling readers.

Smart But Scattered– I feel like this book made me not only a better teacher, but a better parent. This is a super useful guide for the different areas of executive functioning that people struggle with. Executive functioning isn’t one thing as a whole, rather a combination of executive skills. This is a great book to recommend to parents during parent/teacher conferences.

Executive Functions– Russell Barkely is someone who is very knowledgeable about what makes many of our students quirky. He has a variety of books on ADHD, Executive Functioning, and behaviors. I have learned a lot from his insights.

ADDitdue Magazine– They have a variety of online articles about various struggles on Executive Functioning. They have been an invaluable resource in supporting parents.

Have you found other areas that can confuse your students?