Reading Comprehension: Why You Forget What You Read

Finishing a chapter and remembering nothing is not a memory problem. It is usually a processing problem that happened while you were reading.

Fluency versus comprehension

Reading produces a strong feeling of understanding driven by fluency - the ease with which text is processed. That feeling correlates poorly with actual comprehension and retention. Well-written, familiar-sounding text produces the strongest fluency and can produce the largest gap, because nothing interrupts to signal that you have not actually built a model of what is being said.

What comprehension requires

Building a situation model - a mental representation of what the text describes, not just the words. This requires connecting new statements to prior knowledge, resolving references, and inferring what is implied but not stated. It is effortful. Skilled readers monitor comprehension as they go and notice when the model breaks; less skilled readers continue reading without noticing, which is the comprehension monitoring failure.

Reading for retention

Stop and recall periodically - close the book at the end of a section and state the main point in your own words. This is retrieval practice applied to reading and it is the single highest-value change. Ask questions of the text before reading it. Write brief notes in your own words rather than highlighting, since highlighting performs poorly in controlled comparisons. Slow down on dense material and accept that a second careful reading beats a fast one plus a reread.

Where a supplement fits here

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