Let’s begin with a question: how many animals of the same kind did Moses bring on to the Ark?
If you answered “two” then you fell for what researchers Thomas Erickson and Mark Mattson have called the Moses “illusion”. Even though we know that Noah was the man with the Ark, we can all make mistakes when reading quickly.
This sentence-level challenge demonstrates an all-too-common issue with reading. When we read, we tend to rush and not always check what we have read. This can make even skilled and knowledgeable experts prone to reading errors.
The most recent Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa) revealed a broad issue with this type of “hasty reading” among teenagers in England and across other countries within the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development. This assessment data captured a tendency for students to do what as “rushing through a text and giving a quick, wrong answer”.
Pisa reading assessments were undertaken on screens. Teenagers had to read sentences and judge whether they made sense (just like the Moses illusion sentence). They also read longer texts of around 400 words.
Even with the shorter texts, participants failed to detect anomalies or to consistently display secure comprehension.
According to the OECD, which runs Pisa, hasty reading seems to be on rise, with the average proportion of hasty (incorrect and fast) responses increasing significantly between 2018 and 2025 in its countries.
From hasty reading to strategic reading
Of course, findings from international comparisons always need to be interpreted with a degree of caution. Yet beyond Pisa, lots of teachers will recognise the challenge of hasty reading in their own classrooms. How many times have you despaired at a student giving an incorrect answer on a test, not because they didn’t know the material but because they simply did not read the question properly?
So, what can be done about it?
A focus on curriculum and knowledge-building goes a long way towards helping students to read with understanding.
But knowledge alone is not enough to navigate tricky texts. You can understand references, such as Bible stories, and yet read too quickly and make mistakes. It is why students need high-quality teaching that helps them to read more strategically.
Central to this is what researchers describe as : careful rereading, checking, questioning and summarising of a text in order to secure greater understanding.
Comprehension monitoring is about promoting slower and more effortful reading. Try these strategies to encourage the type of monitoring that can counteract the bad habits of hasty reading.
Effortful reading fluency approaches
One way to scaffold comprehension monitoring is to promote reading fluency over reading speed. Too many students read fast, loosely grasping the gist of the text. Instead, teachers can promote targeted rereading and reading aloud, both of which encourage slower, more reflective reading.
For example, you can push repeated reading by assigning “reading partners”, who reread specific passages with different purposes. One partner can read it first for the gist, while the other follows the text and listens critically. They then swap for a second read to check understanding, text-mark or ask questions about the text. Partners can monitor one another’s reading for gaps in fluency or understanding.
Additionally, fluency strategies like “choral reading” - where students repeat sentences read by the teacher - model the practice of rereading, helping to put the brakes on.
Strategies that get students reading aloud, more slowly processing what they read and reading to one another promote more effortful and strategic reading over hasty skimming.
Reading comprehension strategies
The have robust evidence and are perfect for overcoming an urge for quick, error-filled reading.
Strategies such as “prediction”, “questioning”, “clarifying”, “summarising” and “activating prior knowledge” can all be taught quickly and can make a difference.
For example, if you are reading a complex text about Noah’s Ark, the teacher prompting “predictions” and “questions” before students read encourages them to first activate what they already know about the subject matter. Asking students questions like “what do we already know about the Ark in the Bible?” gets them to piece the puzzle together in advance and reduces the likelihood of lazy guesswork as they read.
Then the seemingly simple act of “summarising” gets students to better process and monitor their understanding of what has been read. Routinely asking students to write a simple summary sentence of a 400-word text (like those used in Pisa) helps them to better organise their comprehension and reflect more deeply on what they know (and don’t know).
For longer texts, on screen or in books, simply deciding upon “anchor points” can help. These are stopping points, where the teacher checks for understanding and promotes comprehension monitoring. We can identify (in advance) places where the text becomes most tricky and stop students at these points.
Hard-won understanding
There is a great deal of anxiety about changes in pupils’ reading ability and the impact of screens. Perhaps the Pisa rise in “hasty reading” is related to the assessments being on screen, which might promote speedy, error-filled scrolling?
Whatever the reasons for hasty reading, teachers can be reassured that familiar strategies can make all the difference in their classrooms.
Whether students are reading about Moses in religious studies or Macbeth in English literature, they need to be taught to read more slowly and strategically. If they do, they can avoid making unnecessary mistakes, whether on Pisa tests or in the reading that will go on to support them throughout their lives.
Alex Quigley is the author of books including the Closing the Gap trilogy, Why Learning Fails (And What To Do About It) and Literacy Essentials for Every Teacher
