Is the goal of reading something to comprehend it? In class, we give our students a text and then ask some questions to check whether our students have understood it. Are the questions and answers the purpose of the activity? Probably not – most of us consider comprehension the end goal.
There is a problem with this. Deep comprehension takes effort. If we ask shallow questions, we’ll get shallow comprehension. Readers are unlikely to spend the time and effort to really think about the text; to explore the complexities and nuance; to test the ideas against their own background knowledge; to challenge and struggle with the text if the question was superficial. If comprehension is only likely to be as deep as the activity demands, we ought to design our tasks accordingly. But even a deep comprehension, an idea sitting beautifully but transiently in our working memories isn’t the goal of the reading. The purpose is to make some change in the world.
Often in class the purpose or reading is change in long term memory. In the real world it is likely that the purpose of comprehending a text is to take an action. Either way, the comprehension is better considered a step towards the outcome, not the outcome itself.
Reading for Learning 