Faster Learning

• Comprehension speeds up learning, since students who cannot comprehend material have to read it more than once. By comprehending the material effectively, the student does not have to reread text as often. This allows the student to get better grades in school by gaining more knowledge and learning more rapidly.
  
  

Understanding Words

• Many students learn how to decode words and can successfully read those words aloud. However, they do not necessarily understand what they are reading and will not be able to put what they read into their own words. Comprehension can make people more economically successful by allowing them to more quickly accumulate knowledge and skills relevant to a job.
  
  

Idea Generation

• Students who have comprehension skills can interact with the text and make meaning from it. They can critique ideas contained in the text and evaluate the quality of what they read. The text also sparks new ideas in the student, which plays an important role in the student’s future career. Students are often asked to conduct research into specific topics and come up with new arguments to present in essay form.
  
  

Strategic Thinking

• Students with comprehension skills have the ability to think effectively about ideas, which allow them to think strategically. Strategic thinking can serve as a foundation for more sophisticated types of thinking, such as analysis and metacognition. Metacognition is thinking about thinking, while analysis is the act of breaking down complex ideas into simpler parts.
  
  Students need comprehension skills to be able to enter into the discourse of the subject they are studying. For example, students learning about biology must understand the vocabulary and cause-effect sequences in scientific essays. Analysis is commonly used in literature, such as when a student must explain the meaning of a poem or an essay.
  
  

Developing Comprehension Skills

• Students are the most likely to develop reading comprehension skills when they spend a lot of time reading texts, discussing these readings with other students and writing responses to the texts. Students should read from a variety of genres, according to the U.S. Department of Education.
  
  

Purposeful Reading

• People read with a purpose. Educators often have students read either text that is generated by textbook writers or that was written by authors considered great writers, but not necessarily the writers that students would be interested in reading. Having students read material they aren’t interested in can cause them to fail to see the purpose of reading, causing a loss of interest. The lack of engagement prevents them from thinking about the text in sophisticated ways, according to the National Capital Language Resource Center.