Key Takeaways

• Reading comprehension is the foundational skill behind achievement in math, science, social studies, and career and technical courses, not a task that belongs to English class alone.
• The 2025 Nation's Report Card shows reading gains for 9-year-olds but no movement at age 13, where scores remain statistically flat since 1971.
• Students who cannot parse a word problem, a lab procedure, or a primary source will underperform even when they grasp the underlying content.
• Every discipline reads differently, so students need subject-specific reading comprehension strategies rather than one generic checklist.
• Background knowledge drives comprehension, which is why content-rich instruction in science and social studies lifts reading scores.
• THINKING PRO builds reading comprehension, critical thinking, and media literacy in a single curriculum unit, with documented gains across core subjects.

A student who performs poorly on a chemistry unit test is not always struggling with chemistry. Sometimes the trouble starts earlier, at the sentence level. He misread the setup. She skipped the qualifier in the second clause. He did not notice that the question asked for a comparison, not a definition.

Reading comprehension is the hidden variable in almost every grade a student earns.

The newest national data show where the trouble concentrates. The 2025 Nation’s Report Card reports good news for 9-year-olds, whose average reading score rose 4 points since 2022, with the gains showing up among the lowest performers. At age 13, nothing moved. Scores were flat compared with 2023, still below the pre-pandemic mark set in 2020, and statistically no different from what 13-year-olds scored in 1971. The recovery stalls at exactly the age when reading becomes the tool students use in biology, geometry, history, and more.

Reading Comprehension Shows Up in Math, Science, and Social Studies

Students across every subject area are asked to parse text constantly.

• Math: Word problems require students to translate prose into operations. Studies drawing on international assessment data have found that reading comprehension correlates with achievement in both math and science, independent of computation skill.
• Science: Lab directions, data tables, and claim-evidence-reasoning prompts all demand careful reading. A misread procedure ruins the experiment before any science happens.
• Social studies: Primary sources come loaded with unfamiliar syntax, bias, and context that students have to reconstruct.
• Electives and career and technical education (CTE): Safety manuals, rubrics, scoring guides, and specifications are dense, technical text.

Test scores follow. When a student cannot hold an argument in working memory long enough to evaluate it, every subject that uses argument suffers.

Each Subject Reads Differently

Literacy across the curriculum is not one skill applied five times. Disciplinary literacy emphasizes that mathematicians, chemists, and historians read their own field's texts in strikingly different ways: Historians check the source and the date first, then read for perspective. Chemists move between prose, diagrams, and equations, translating as they go. Mathematicians reread slowly, line by line, treating every word as load-bearing.

Telling students to "find the main idea" does not prepare them for any of that. Content area literacy works when teachers name the reading comprehension strategies their own discipline requires and model them in practice.

Background Knowledge Is the Engine

Comprehension is not an isolating skill. Readers understand what they already know something about, which is why a strong reader can stall out on an unfamiliar topic.

A Thomas B. Fordham Institute study using federal longitudinal data found that more instructional time in social studies was associated with better reading comprehension in fifth grade, while more time in the English language arts block was not. Students from lower-income and non-English-speaking homes benefited most.

The takeaway for school leaders is direct: Cutting content subjects to buy more reading practice alone can backfire. Effective reading comprehension practice draws on multiple subjects and skill areas.

Build Reading Comprehension and Critical Thinking Together

Skills that cross subjects need instruction that crosses subjects. That’s why THINKING PRO, a curriculum unit from Thinking Habitats, teaches close reading, critical thinking, and media literacy through real, current, local issues.

THINKING PRO’s comprehensive approach brings real results:

• A randomized controlled trial with ninth and tenth graders produced moderate to large effect sizes in reading, writing, science, and math.
• Across 29 high school classrooms and more than 700 students, 86% improved in critical thinking, reading comprehension, and media literacy.
• School-wide rollouts reported 88% proficiency in reading strategies and higher graduation test scores in five subjects.

Reading comprehension is the skill that pays across the schedule. Teach it that way with THINKING PRO. Learn more about versions and use cases, or contact us today to book a live walkthrough of the THINKING PRO unit and platform.

Here at Thinking Habitats, we use thinking tools to empower young people to lead successful lives and contribute to the well-being of their communities. Our online platform has helped students improve their critical thinking, reading comprehension, and news media literacy, and has had significant individual and community impacts.

Get THINKING PRO today and enable students to feel more empowered in decision-making, more mindful of their news engagement, and more connected to their local community!

References:

2025 Long-Term Trend Reading and Mathematics Assessment at age 9 and 13. (n.d.). In The Nation’s Report Card. https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/ltt/2025/reading/scores-percentiles/?age=13

Akbaşlı, S., Şahin, M., & Zeliha Yaykiran, St. (2016). The effect of reading comprehension on the performance in science and mathematics. In Hacettepe University, Faculty of Education, Ankara, Turkey & Yıldız Technical University, Faculty of Education, Istanbul, Turkey, Journal of Education and Practice: Vol. Vol.7 (Issue No.16, pp. 108–109). https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1108657.pdf

Sawchuk, S. (2024, October 28). What is disciplinary literacy? Education Week. https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/what-is-disciplinary-literacy/2024/10

The Thomas B. Fordham Institute, Tyner, A., Ph. D., & Kabourek, S. (2024, September 24). Social Studies Instruction and Reading Comprehension: Evidence from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study. The Thomas B. Fordham Institute.
https://fordhaminstitute.org/national/resources/social-studies-instruction-and-reading-comprehension