They Read It...But Did They Understand It? A Parent's Guide to Reading Comprehension

One of the most common conversations I have with students goes something like this:

"Okay, so what was the passage about?"

Silence.

A shrug.

"I don't know."

Now, here's the interesting part.

When I start asking a few follow-up questions, it often turns out that the student understood much more than they thought they did.

"Who was the passage mostly about?"

"Oh, it was about a kid whose family moved to a new town."

"What happened after they moved?"

"Well, he was nervous about making friends..."

"What was the biggest problem he faced?"

"He felt like he didn't fit in."

Suddenly, the student is telling me exactly what the passage was about.

The information was there all along.

The challenge wasn't reading the words. The challenge was figuring out how to explain what they had read.

Many middle and high school students struggle with this. They can read a chapter, an article, or a story and follow what's happening as they read. But when they're asked to identify the main idea, summarize the text, make an inference, or explain their thinking, they freeze.

Sometimes they genuinely missed important information.

But often, they simply don't realize that they already have the pieces they need.

They know the subject because they can point to the title.

They know some of the details because they remember what happened.

What they haven't learned yet is how to put those pieces together into a clear explanation.

The good news is that this is a skill—and like any skill, it can be taught.

Students who struggle to explain what they read are not necessarily poor readers. In many cases, they just need a process that helps them organize their thoughts and turn understanding into words.

Let's look at why this happens and what can help.

Why Students Freeze When You Ask, "What Was It About?"

Many parents assume that reading comprehension is simple.

A student either understood what they read or they didn't.

In reality, there is often a middle ground.

Many students understand far more than they realize.

The problem starts when they're asked to explain that understanding.

Think about the last movie you watched.

You followed the plot. You knew who the characters were. You understood what happened.

Now imagine someone asking:

"So what was the movie about?"

Most people don't immediately launch into a perfect summary.

Instead, they pause.

Should they mention the main character?

The conflict?

The ending?

The theme?

There are dozens of details they could talk about, and they have to decide which ones matter most.

Many students face the same challenge when they read.

They remember pieces of information, but they struggle to identify which pieces are the most important. As a result, they may start listing random details, focus on the title, or simply say, "I don't know."

For some students—especially students with ADHD—the challenge isn't understanding every word they read. The challenge is figuring out which information deserves their attention. When everything feels equally important, identifying the main idea can feel surprisingly difficult.

Then there is another group of students I see all the time: the perfectionists.

These students often have an idea of what the passage was about.

They may even have a very good answer.

But before they speak, they start second-guessing themselves.

"What if that's not what the teacher wants?"

"What if I missed something?"

"What if my answer is wrong?"

So instead of sharing their thinking, they freeze.

When I work with these students, I'll often start asking smaller questions.

"Who or what was the passage mostly about?"

"What was the biggest problem or idea?"

"What happened because of that?"

And almost every time, the student begins giving me useful information.

The understanding was there.

They simply needed help identifying what was important and organizing their thoughts into words.

That's an important distinction.

A student who needs support organizing their thoughts requires a very different approach than a student who didn't understand the text at all.

Decoding, Understanding, and Analyzing: What's the Difference?

Part of the confusion comes from the vocabulary schools use.

Students hear words like decoding, comprehension, inference, and analysis and often assume they're being asked to do something mysterious or complicated.

Most of the time, they aren't.

Let's break it down.

Decoding

Decoding is simply reading the words.

If a student looks at a sentence and can recognize the words on the page, they are decoding.

For example, a student might read:

"The boy walked through the woods searching for his lost dog."

They can pronounce all the words correctly.

Great.

But decoding alone doesn't tell us whether they understood the sentence.

Understanding

Understanding means making sense of what was read.

If I ask:

"Who is searching for the dog?"

"The boy."

"Where is he looking?"

"In the woods."

Now the student is showing comprehension.

They understand the information the author directly stated.

Analyzing

Analysis goes one step further.

Instead of asking what happened, we start asking why it matters.

Why might the author have chosen a forest instead of a busy city street?

How might the boy be feeling?

Why is the lost dog important to the story?

What clues does the author give us?

Suddenly we're moving beyond the facts and thinking about meaning.

And here's the good news:

Most students already do this in everyday life.

Ask them why their favorite sports team lost a game.

Ask them why a character in a movie made a certain decision.

Ask them why a friend seemed upset after a conversation.

They'll often provide detailed explanations without realizing they're analyzing.

The skill isn't as mysterious as it sounds.

The challenge is learning how to apply that same thinking process to books, articles, and school assignments.

Once students understand that analyzing is really just explaining their thinking and supporting it with evidence, the task often becomes much less intimidating.

The Questions That Help Students Find the Answer

When a student says, "I don't know," it's tempting to assume they didn't understand the reading.

Sometimes that's true.

But often, they simply need help organizing their thoughts.

One of the most effective strategies is to stop asking for the entire answer all at once.

Instead, break the task into smaller questions.

For example, instead of asking:

"What was the passage about?"

Try asking:

Who or what was the passage mostly about?

What was the biggest problem, event, or idea?

What happened because of that?

Why was that important?

Many students who cannot answer the first question can answer all four of the smaller ones.

And something interesting happens.

Once they answer those smaller questions, they often discover that they already know the answer to the bigger question.

Let's look at an example.

Imagine a student reads a story about a teenager who moves to a new school and struggles to make friends.

If I ask:

"What was the story about?"

I may get an "I don't know."

So we start smaller.

"Who was the story mostly about?"

"A teenager."

"What was his biggest problem?"

"He didn't fit in."

"Okay?"

At this point, the student usually starts laughing because they know exactly what's happening.

They know I am about to ask another question.

"So why didn't he fit in?"

"He was new."

"Okay. Tell me why specifically."

"Because he didn't know anybody yet."

"How did that make him feel?"

"Lonely."

Now we're getting somewhere.

Notice what happened.

I didn't tell the student the answer.

I simply helped them slow down and unpack what they already knew.

By the end of that conversation, the student can often produce a summary like:

"The story was about a teenager who moved to a new school and felt lonely because he didn't know anyone yet."

The understanding was there from the beginning.

The student simply needed help connecting the pieces and explaining their thinking.

Over time, students begin asking these questions for themselves.

And that's when reading comprehension starts becoming much easier.

What Reading Comprehension Actually Looks Like

Sometimes parents ask me how they can tell whether their student truly understood a passage.

The answer is often simpler than people expect.

A student with strong reading comprehension can usually do some combination of the following:

Explain what happened in their own words.

Identify the main idea.

Describe important details.

Explain why something happened.

Support their ideas with evidence from the text.

Notice that none of these skills require a student to sound like an English teacher.

They simply require the student to explain their thinking.

For example, imagine I ask a student why a character feels lonely.

"He feels lonely because he doesn't know anybody at the new school."

That's a pretty good answer.

But we're not quite done yet.

This is usually where I ask:

"Okay. How do you know?"

Or:

"Where specifically in the story did you find that out?"

At first, students sometimes look at me like I've grown a second head.

After all, they just answered the question.

But what we're really practicing is one of the most important reading skills students can learn: supporting an idea with evidence.

Maybe the student points to a sentence where the character eats lunch alone.

Maybe they find a passage where the character says he misses his old friends.

Maybe they identify a paragraph describing how nervous he feels around his new classmates.

Now the student isn't just giving an opinion.

They're connecting their thinking to the text itself.

That's where reading comprehension begins to grow into stronger academic reading.

Students move from:

"I think this happened."

to

"I think this happened because the text shows..."

And that shift makes a tremendous difference in middle school, high school, and beyond.

This doesn't just happen with stories.

I see the same thing with nonfiction passages, especially when students are preparing for standardized tests like the SAT or ACT.

A student may read a passage about pollution, social media, or a scientific discovery and know what the topic is.

But when I ask:

"What is the author's main point?"

or

"What argument is the author making?"

they freeze.

Knowing the topic and understanding the author's message are two different things.

Once students learn how to identify the author's claim and locate the evidence supporting it, those passages become much easier to navigate.

The Good News

The good news is that most students are closer than they think they are.

When I work with students on reading comprehension, I'm rarely teaching them how to read the words.

Most of them can already do that.

Instead, we're working on questions like:

What was important?

Why was it important?

How do you know?

Where does the text show that?

These aren't questions that come naturally to every student.

They're skills that can be learned and practiced.

In fact, many students are surprised by how much they already know once we start breaking a passage apart together.

A student who begins with:

"I don't know."

often ends up explaining exactly what happened, why it happened, and where the text supports that idea.

The information was there.

They simply needed a process for pulling it together and explaining it.

Over time, students start noticing patterns.

They become better at identifying important details.

They become more comfortable explaining their thinking.

And they become less intimidated by questions that once felt impossible to answer.

The goal isn't to turn students into tiny English teachers.

The goal is to help them understand what they're reading and feel confident talking about it.

Final Thoughts

If your student has ever read an entire passage and then stared at you blankly when you asked what it was about, you're not alone.

I see this all the time.

And more often than not, the problem isn't that the student wasn't paying attention or didn't read carefully enough.

They simply need help figuring out what information matters, how the pieces connect, and how to explain their thinking.

Many students walk into a reading assignment thinking the goal is simply to finish it.

Then a teacher starts asking questions, and suddenly the assignment feels much harder.

The good news is that those questions are not a mystery. Students can learn how to identify important details, connect ideas, make inferences, and support their thinking with evidence from the text.

And trust me—there are few things more satisfying than watching a student go from "I don't know" to a detailed explanation they were convinced they couldn't give five minutes earlier.