How to Make Reading a More Engaging Experience

Think about the last time you read a chapter from a textbook or article. Did you genuinely understand what you read – or did your eyes scan the words while your mind wandered elsewhere? This experience is more common than most people realize, and it points to a fundamental truth about reading: simply moving your eyes across a page is not the same as actually reading. Reading is an active process – one that requires deliberate mental effort, engagement, and strategy. For children especially, learning to read actively rather than passively can make all the difference in how well they understand, retain, and use what they have read.

Why passive reading doesn’t work
Steps to improve reading comprehension
Set a purpose before reading
Asking questions while reading
Note-taking and annotation
Summarisation in your own words
Using graphic organisers
Using prior knowledge to enhance understanding
How schema shapes meaning during reading
Practical ways to activate prior knowledge
Making text-to-self and text-to-world connections

Why passive reading doesn’t work

Passive reading happens when a reader technically reads the words but absorbs very little about what is written. As The Classroom explains, passive readers read to get the reading over with, while active readers begin with a genuine desire to find out what is being said. The difference is essentially one of intent and engagement.

When children read passively, they rely on shallow cognitive processing – recognising letters, sounding out words, but not connecting ideas or building meaning. Research on the depth of processing model explains this well: when readers focus only on surface features of a text, they create weak, quickly fading memory traces. Deep processing – engaging with the meaning, connecting ideas to existing knowledge, and thinking critically – creates far stronger and more lasting understanding.

The result of passive reading is a child who finishes a page and cannot tell you what it said. Comprehension is not just a byproduct of being able to decode words. Even fluent readers can struggle with comprehension if they are not actively engaging with the material. According to Read Naturally, reading comprehension is an active and ongoing process – not something that happens automatically once word recognition is in place.

This is why teaching children active reading strategies matters so much. According to the Institute of Education Sciences, the sooner students can harness active reading strategies, the wider their access to a greater variety of texts and learning opportunities.

Steps to improve reading comprehension

Active reading is a learnable skill, not a natural gift. It involves specific, teachable steps that can be applied before, during, and after reading. Here are the most effective methods supported by research:

Set a purpose before reading

One of the simplest yet most powerful shifts is helping children establish a reason to read before they begin. Active reading strategies give students a reason or purpose for reading, which focuses the mind and reduces the chance of it wandering. This can be as straightforward as asking, “What do you think this is about?” or “What do you want to find out?” A reader who begins with a question is primed to search for answers – and that search keeps them mentally engaged throughout.

Asking questions while reading

Encouraging children to ask questions as they read – not just after – is one of the most well-researched active reading strategies. Research shows that good readers use metacognitive strategies to think about and monitor their own reading comprehension. When they encounter something they do not understand, they have strategies to “fix” the problem rather than simply moving on.

A useful technique from Princeton’s McGraw Center for Teaching and Learning is turning headings and subheadings into questions before reading a section. For example, a heading like “The Water Cycle” becomes “What is the water cycle and how does it work?” This simple transformation changes the child’s posture from passive receiver to active investigator.

Note-taking and annotation

Many students are taught to highlight text, but highlighting alone can be deceptively passive – it gives the feeling of engagement without demanding any real thinking. A far more effective approach is marginal note-taking: writing brief comments, questions, or summaries in the margins of a text. Every time a reader feels the urge to highlight something, they should write instead – summarising the point in their own words, questioning the author, or noting a connection.

For younger children who cannot yet write in margins, sticky notes work equally well. Research with primary school students has found that teaching children to use sticky notes to mark connections while reading independently deepens their understanding and leads to richer discussion of the text.

Summarisation in your own words

Summarisation is one of the strongest indicators of genuine comprehension. If a child can retell what they have read – in their own words, without looking back – they have truly understood it. Students can be explicitly taught first to retell orally, then in writing, later to restate and support a main idea, and finally to summarise a full text. This progression builds both comprehension and communication skills at the same time.

The SQ3R method – Survey, Question, Read, Recite, Review – is a structured framework that incorporates summarisation naturally. Developed in the 1940s by Dr. Francis P. Robinson, it remains a proven framework for creating active readers by teaching them to preview a text, ask questions, engage deeply, and then summarise and review their understanding.

Using graphic organisers

Visual tools like concept maps, KWL charts (Know – Want to know – Learned), and Venn diagrams help children organise information as they read. Graphic organisers help readers focus on concepts and how they relate to other concepts in a text, making relationships between ideas visible rather than abstract. They are particularly useful for children who are visual learners or who find it difficult to hold complex ideas in working memory while reading.

Using prior knowledge to enhance understanding

One of the most significant – and often overlooked – factors in reading comprehension is what the reader already knows before they begin. This is explained through schema theory, a foundational concept in reading research. Schema Theory is a cognitive framework that explains how individuals organise and integrate new information with their existing knowledge stored in long-term memory. In simple terms, a schema is a mental framework built from past experiences, prior learning, and stored knowledge about how the world works.

When a child reads about volcanoes and already knows that the earth has layers of rock and molten material beneath the surface, they have a schema to hook the new information onto. Prior knowledge allows students to activate their schema, which acts as a foundation for new learning and helps them make sense of new information. Without that foundation, even well-written texts can feel disconnected and hard to follow.

How schema shapes meaning during reading

Schema theory tells us that a text only provides clues that enable readers to construct meaning from their existing knowledge. The text itself does not contain meaning in a fixed, transferable form – meaning is constructed by the reader, using the text as a guide. This is why two children reading the same passage can walk away with very different understandings: their different schemas lead them to interpret the same words in different ways.

This also explains why background knowledge gaps are so critical to address. If a reader does not have relevant background information, it may be difficult – or even impossible – for them to detect the logical organisation of the text being read. Comprehension breaks down not because the child lacks reading ability, but because they lack the prior knowledge needed to make sense of the content.

Practical ways to activate prior knowledge

Teachers and parents can help children activate their existing schemas before reading through several well-tested techniques. Pre-reading discussions – simply talking about the topic before introducing the text – warm up the relevant knowledge and prepare the brain to receive new information. Anticipation guides, where children respond to true/false statements about the topic before reading, also serve this purpose effectively, as described by the California Academy of Sciences in their science reading strategies resource.

The KWL chart mentioned earlier is another excellent activation tool. In the first column, children record what they already know about a topic. This forces them to surface their existing schema consciously, creating a ready framework for new information to connect to. By activating their prior knowledge, students can generate hypotheses about the content of the text, which enhances both engagement and motivation.

Building background knowledge over time is equally important. As students expand what they know about the world, they are better able to connect new information to prior learning, draw inferences, and deepen understanding. Wide reading across different subjects and genres is one of the most effective ways to build the rich, varied schemas that support strong comprehension across all areas of learning.

Making text-to-self and text-to-world connections

One of the most accessible ways to help children apply prior knowledge during reading is through structured connection-making. Readers can be taught to ask: “Does this remind me of something from my own life?” (text-to-self), “Does this connect to something else I’ve read?” (text-to-text), and “Does this relate to something happening in the world?” (text-to-world). Keeping the focus on open-ended questions – what does this text make you want to learn more about? – rather than just literal comprehension opens up richer thinking and encourages children to see reading as a conversation rather than a task.

When children are taught to read this way – purposefully, questioningly, and connectedly – reading stops being a decoding exercise and becomes a genuine thinking activity. That shift in how children approach text is ultimately what makes the difference between a child who reads and a child who truly understands.

What do you think? How do you currently help children build their background knowledge before introducing a new reading text – and do you notice a difference in their comprehension when that preparation is in place? If you were to introduce just one active reading strategy in your classroom or home learning environment tomorrow, which would you start with and why?

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References

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Table of Contents

Why passive reading doesn’t work 🔗

Steps to improve reading comprehension 🔗

Set a purpose before reading 🔗

Asking questions while reading 🔗

Note-taking and annotation 🔗

Summarisation in your own words 🔗

Using graphic organisers 🔗

Using prior knowledge to enhance understanding 🔗

How schema shapes meaning during reading 🔗

Practical ways to activate prior knowledge 🔗

Making text-to-self and text-to-world connections 🔗