'Reading comprehension is not a “skill” like riding a bike or making free throws in basketball. It’s heavily dependent on the background knowledge readers bring to a text. Thus your ability to make a correct inference when reading about baseball, for example, does not mean you can make correct inferences when reading about a Japanese tea ceremony. There’s no abstract skill called “inferencing” that you can practice, master, and apply with equal effect on whatever you read. This places strict limits on reading strategies. That said, test score gains have long been associated with Reading Comprehension Strategies (RCS). “The funny thing about reading comprehension strategy instruction is that it really shouldn’t work, but it does,” the pair note. But once kids get the big idea behind RCS—that a piece of text is trying to tell us something—there’s zero evidence that repeated practice has any beneficial effect. Ten lessons are as good as fifty. “The implication seems obvious,” they conclude. “RCS instruction should be explicit and brief.”' @rpondiscio with a tight description of a central insight in comprehension.