3 Resources to Improve Reading Comprehension

TL;DR

The transcript explains how teachers can use AI to create pre-reading activities that strengthen students’ reading comprehension before they begin a text. Using Hatchet by Gary Paulsen as an example, the speaker demonstrates three AI-generated classroom tools:

Step 1 – Vocabulary Preview

AI identifies 10 key vocabulary words from a chapter, defines them, and creates a cloze (fill-in-the-blank) test. This prepares students to recognize and understand important terms before reading.

Step 2 – Text Structure Outline

AI produces a two-column outline of the chapter: one column lists story details; the other provides a space for students to mark “Y/N” or note page numbers when they locate those details in the text. This supports organization and comprehension during reading.

Step 3 – Critical Thinking Questions

AI generates five thought-provoking questions about the chapter to guide students’ focus and discussion. The teacher can adapt question difficulty for different grade levels.

The transcript emphasizes that these resources are pre-reading tools, not graded assignments. Their purpose is to build vocabulary, preview structure, and establish conceptual frameworks that promote deeper understanding and more effective discussion after reading.

Teacher Take-aways

Pedagogical Implications

Effective reading comprehension instruction begins before students open the book. The transcript highlights several foundational teaching principles that align with evidence-based literacy practice.

  • Pre-Reading Preparation: Engaging students with text-related activities before reading builds background knowledge, increases motivation, and improves comprehension outcomes.
  • Frontloading Vocabulary: Introducing key vocabulary before students encounter it in context allows them to read more fluently and focus on meaning rather than decoding unfamiliar words.
  • Active and Structured Reading: Tools such as two-column outlines or checklists encourage students to monitor understanding, locate key details, and practice close reading.
  • Guiding Questions: Providing essential or critical thinking questions helps students establish a reading purpose, connect ideas, and support comprehension during and after reading.
  • Discussion for Deep Understanding: Structured classroom discussion remains one of the most powerful comprehension strategies, helping students clarify ideas and construct shared meaning.
  • Differentiation and Developmental Fit: Reading supports should be adjusted for grade level and cognitive readiness to ensure accessibility for all learners.
  • Formative over Summative Use: Pre-reading tasks serve as scaffolds for learning, not graded assessments, reinforcing a focus on growth and comprehension development.
  • Scaffolded Independence: Through modeling and structured supports—vocabulary previews, outlines, and questioning—teachers guide students toward independent, strategic reading.

These strategies reflect the gradual release of responsibility model (Pearson & Gallagher, 1983) and demonstrate how thoughtful preparation leads students from supported practice toward confident, self-directed comprehension.

AI Support and Use

AI tools can streamline and enhance proven literacy strategies by helping teachers create targeted, high-quality materials quickly.

  • Pre-Reading Preparation: Use AI to generate summaries, background information, or introductory activities that activate prior knowledge and set a clear purpose for reading.
  • Frontloading Vocabulary: Ask AI to identify key terms from a text, define them at an appropriate grade level, and create short practice exercises or cloze tests.
  • Active and Structured Reading: Have AI create outlines, organizers, or checklists that guide students to track details and monitor comprehension as they read.
  • Guiding Questions: Use AI to develop essential or critical thinking questions aligned with grade-level standards and text complexity.
  • Discussion and Reflection: Generate discussion prompts or small-group conversation starters that connect text content to key themes and student experiences.
  • Differentiation: Ask AI to adapt questions, vocabulary lists, or reading guides for different reading levels or language proficiencies.
  • Formative Learning Tools: Use AI to create ungraded comprehension checks, self-assessments, or reading journals that help students reflect on understanding.

By integrating AI into these processes, teachers can focus less on material creation and more on responsive instruction, ensuring that all students engage deeply with reading and develop independent comprehension skills.

Transcript and Prompts

Let’s talk about reading comprehension.

Now, one thing that we know from both practice and from research is that when kids have a chance to study and get engaged in the reading material before they actually start reading it, then their levels of comprehension are going to go up.

So, let’s take a look at three quick ways that AI can help us with those pre-reading tasks that will lead to comprehension. We’re going to do three prompts here.

First Step

The first one is to look at vocabulary before we ever get to the vocabulary, before we get to the reading. So, here’s the first one.

Sixth grade students studying chapter one of Hatchet, and we’re going to ask the AI to assist us with some tasks.

The first is to identify a series of vocabulary words and let the students have a chance to learn about the words, use them, see how they’re applied before they actually find them in text. So, we’re going to pull out 10 words and we’re going to create a close test for the students to practice putting the words into place. And let’s take a look at this. Let’s copy it all and drop it into our AI.

Prompt

You are an instructional specialist for middle school language arts.

My 6th grade students are studying Chapter 1 of Hatchet by Gary Paulsen.

Here are your tasks:

  1. Provide 10 vocabulary words from this chapter with short definitions. Put the words in alphabetical order.
  2. Create a cloze test using these words, with blanks for filling in the words. Sample: “he grabbed the _____ as the plane swerved.”

Here is the text for chapter 1

So there is the full prompt. And then what we’re going to do is drop in the text.

Now, a lot of texts ChatGPT or the other AIs already know, but just in case it doesn’t, I happen to have a copy of the text for chapter 1, which I will then drop into my prompt right here.

Okay, so we’re asking for 10 vocabulary words with definitions and a closed test. And you will notice that for the closed test, I actually provided a sample of what it would look like with the blank in place and the rest of the sentence.

Let’s see what AI can do with this.

Research tells us that studying the words before we encounter them is a great way to begin improving vocabulary, and it specifically leads to comprehension because kids will have a better understanding of what the text means.

So what do we have? I dropped it all in, and I said go, and here we go.

Appropriate for sixth grade language art. There are vocabulary terms and a little definition in alphabetical order.

What we should have next is-—yes, we’ve got our close test for the students to practice using those words. So that is number one.

Second Step

Now, number two. To follow up on that, we are going to create a resource for students to help them to begin to organize and understand what happens in the text.

For this, we’re going to ask the AI to create a detailed outline in two column format.

  • One column is going to have the outline item by item.
  • And the second column is a place for the students to mark off whether or not they have found it in text.

Now, what we could do is here we’ve got yes or no, they have found it in the text. We could also put in instead the page number where the text is been has been found. So the students would fill that out.

Prompt

Create a detailed outline of this chapter in two-column format. Every item in the outline should be on a separate table row.

The structure is as follows:

Column 1: Header = “Details”. In this column, put the outline, with separate rows for each item.

Column 2: Header = “Found it! (Y/N)”. In this column, add place for the students to write “Y” or “N” indicating that they have read about that item in the text.

The title for the document should be the book title, chapter, and a place for student’s name.

Let’s see if this will give us what we need. At the top of it: book title, chapter, and a place for the student’s name.

Now I’m going to do this in the same discussion thread because it’s going to refer back to the text above obviously. So let’s drop it in there. and let’s have the AI create this resource for us so the students can start making sense of the content and start looking for specific points within the plot of that particular chapter.

For some reason, it’s given this to me as HTML code which is not what I want, so let’s say

Prompt

Display this as a table. Do not use HTML

and let’s see if this will actually give us a nice item that we can download and print up.

Okay, sure enough, there it is right there. We’ve got our chapter, student name, and then they can it to indicate whether or not they have found it in the text.

One thing I will note: For either of these resources, you’re not going to grade this and put it into your grade book. You might work through it with the students or have them work on it as they go along, but it’s not something that you’re going to put in grade book. These are all pre-reading setup resources and tools.

Later, you will come back to some kind of comprehension assessment techniques. These are specifically intended to help improve comprehension, which you will later test.

Okay, so we’ve got a nice table there. We’ve got a nice outline and a place for students to mark off if they have found it in the text. Now, that’s number two.

Third Step

The third part is to start thinking about what do you want students to understand from the text. Not just what’s in it, but are there some things that we can have as takeaways or concepts or issues that we want students to get out of it.

What we’re going to do is before the students read the text, we’re going to give them those questions. They can then begin thinking about them while they’re reading the text.

It’s going to create a mental framework for them, so as they read, they can start dropping information into that framework.

So here then is our third prompt and it’s very simple.

Prompt

Give me five critical thinking questions about this chapter.

You will let the students know that once the reading has been done, these are the questions you’re coming back to so they have an idea of what it is they should be looking for and thinking about while they’re reading.

So, let’s grab this one and let’s see if we can get five good questions.

Now, this is obviously for a sixth grade, a sixth-grade text. This can very easily be modified down to kindergarten, first grade, all the way up to some very advanced higher education level text.

If the questions seem too hard, too abstract, or too simple, then what you’re going to want to do is in the prompt, you’re going to add something along the lines of “appropriate for students at blank grade level.”

Questions about the chapter; make them appropriate for second grade students or high school students or college-level students. But here we’re looking at sixth grade because that’s what we said at the beginning.

So here we’ve got five critical questions for the students to think about while they’re reading. We will come back later and use them in small groups or whole group discussion because frankly discussion is the number one strategy for comprehension.

But we want to let the students know here’s what we’re aiming for and here’s what we’re thinking about.

Conclusion

So what am I going to do now that I’ve got all these?

  • I’ve got my vocabulary list and my close test somewhere. There we go.
  • After this, I’m going to copy it, drop it into a document.
  • I’ve got my columns for organizing the information in the text, which is here. That’s going to go on page two.
  • And then what I’m going to do is I’m going to then copy the critical thinking questions. We might even talk about them first, but I’m going to give them to the students before they start reading.

And then from here, with these tools in place, they’re well along the way for understanding the content that we are studying with them. And that will ultimately result in improved reading comprehension. When we’re reading, that’s what we’re trying to help kids get to.

And these are three quick resources generated by AI that will ultimately lead to improved comprehension.

I hope you found this technique useful. Thank you.

 

Transcript Outline

Outline of Video Transcript: “AI Tools for Reading Comprehension”

  1. Introduction: Understanding Reading Comprehension
    1. Importance of pre-reading engagement
      • Research shows students comprehend better when they study before reading.
      • Practice confirms higher comprehension through engagement.
    2. AI’s role in improving comprehension
      • Assists with pre-reading tasks.
      • Three AI-based prompts will be demonstrated.
  2. Step One: Vocabulary Preparation
    1. Purpose of vocabulary study before reading
      • Improves understanding of text meaning.
      • Strengthens word recognition during reading.
    2. Example: 6th Grade Class Reading Hatchet, Chapter 1
      • Identify and study vocabulary before reading.
      • AI assists in creating learning materials.
    3. AI prompt for vocabulary activity
      • Provide 10 vocabulary words in alphabetical order with short definitions.
      • Create a cloze (fill-in-the-blank) test using those words.
      • Sample: “He grabbed the _____ as the plane swerved.”
    4. Implementation details
      • Insert Chapter 1 text into AI.
      • AI generates a vocabulary list and a cloze test.
    5. Educational rationale
      • Studying vocabulary before reading builds comprehension.
      • Helps students connect meaning during reading.
  3. Step Two: Creating a Text-Organization Resource
    1. Purpose of the outline activity
      • Helps students track and understand story details.
      • Encourages active engagement with text structure.
    2. AI prompt for two-column outline
      • Column 1: “Details” — outline items.
      • Column 2: “Found it! (Y/N)” — student marker.
      • Title includes book, chapter, and student name.
    3. Options for Column 2
      • Use “Yes/No”.
      • Or record page numbers.
    4. Output formatting adjustments
      • Initial output was HTML-only code.
      • Revised prompt: “Display this as a table. Do not use HTML.”
      • Produced a printable table for classroom use.
    5. Pedagogical notes
      • Not graded; serves as pre-reading organizer.
      • Prepares for later comprehension assessments.
  4. Step Three: Generating Critical Thinking Questions
    1. Purpose of pre-reading questions
      • Encourages critical thinking before and during reading.
      • Creates a mental framework for key concepts.
    2. AI prompt for questions
      • “Give me five critical thinking questions about this chapter.”
      • Guide reading and post-reading discussion.
    3. Adaptability by grade level
      • Modify difficulty to match learner ability.
      • Example: “Appropriate for second grade students.”
    4. Classroom use
      • Provide questions before reading.
      • Use later for small-group or whole-class discussion.
      • Discussion is emphasized as a top comprehension strategy.
  5. Integrating the Three Resources
    1. Combined use in lesson preparation
      • Vocabulary list and cloze test — page one.
      • Two-column text organizer — page two.
      • Critical thinking questions — page three.
    2. Teaching sequence
      • Introduce vocabulary.
      • Use organizer during reading.
      • Discuss critical questions after reading.
    3. Outcome
      • Students gain better comprehension skills.
      • Teachers have structured, AI-generated materials.
  6. Conclusion
    1. AI generates three key pre-reading resources
      • Vocabulary and cloze test.
      • Text outline with tracking column.
      • Critical thinking questions.
    2. Educational impact
      • Prepares students for deeper understanding.
      • Supports active reading and discussion.
    3. Final note
      • Tools engage students before, during, and after reading.