Lead
Read a passage aloud, and the words come out smoothly. Ask what the story was about, and the child goes quiet. This disconnect appears with surprising frequency around third grade.
"Can read but doesn't seem to understand" strikes parents as puzzling. If a child can accurately decode every word, shouldn't the meaning follow automatically? Reading research has long separated these two abilities. The fluency to read words aloud (decoding) and the ability to understand what was read (comprehension) are supported by different cognitive processes, and they are prone to diverging precisely at the transition from early to middle elementary school.
Why does this happen around grade three? And what can parents do when they notice the gap?