AI Reading Comprehension Helper for Students

How it works

From complex text to supported comprehension in four steps.

Paste the passage and select the level

The teacher pastes the text passage and selects the subject and level, including Special education and English language learners. The level is shown on the guide, and the text stays as you pasted it.

Receive a pre-reading vocabulary preview

Before reading, the guide has a line for words to know, and questions on what students already know and what they expect to find out; you fill in the words with student-friendly definitions. Pre-teaching vocabulary before a complex text significantly improves comprehension for below-grade-level readers and English Language Learners. The preview can also include idiomatic expressions and figurative language that a literal reader might misinterpret.

Stop after each paragraph

The AI provides a summary of each section or paragraph. Students who struggle with dense text can use these notes to check their understanding after each section before moving forward. Students who are confident readers can move straight to the questions. The structure supports both, without the same text.

Answer comprehension questions at increasing depth

The AI generates five comprehension check questions from easy to hard, which can move through three levels: literal (What does the passage say?), inferential (What does it imply?), and evaluative (What does the student think about it?). The increasing depth matches the cognitive progression from basic recall to critical engagement. Students work through the questions on the printed guide, and the teacher checks their answers.

The grade-level text access problem

In many classrooms, some students are reading more than two years below grade level. These students are required to engage with grade-level academic texts in every subject, but without scaffolding, they often read the words without comprehending the meaning. The traditional solution, giving struggling readers simplified texts, solves the access problem but creates a new problem: students who only read simplified texts do not build the academic vocabulary and syntax familiarity they need for standardized tests and higher education.

The AI Reading Comprehension Helper provides scaffolding that enables access to the original text, rather than replacing it.

What the reading comprehension helper includes

Every scaffold is designed to support reading of the original text, not replace it.

Pre-reading vocabulary preview

Identifying and pre-teaching the 5-8 most important vocabulary terms before a complex text is one of the highest-impact reading interventions in the research literature. The AI identifies terms that are simultaneously important to the passage's meaning and likely to be unfamiliar at the level chosen, and generates student-friendly definitions.

Main idea after each part

Dense academic text can be cognitively overwhelming for struggling readers who have no way to check their understanding as they go. The guide asks students to stop after each paragraph and write the main idea for each part. Students can read a part, write its main idea, and continue, rather than reading the whole passage and discovering they lost the thread halfway through.

Comprehension questions after reading

The questions move from what the text says (the main idea and a supporting detail) to what the writer wants you to think and what the text makes you wonder. This progression matches the reading comprehension frameworks used in standardized tests and ensures that students who can answer literal questions are also pushed to engage at the inferential and evaluative levels where deeper understanding is demonstrated.

Text structure question

Different text types use different organizational structures: cause-and-effect, compare-and-contrast, problem-solution, sequence, description, and argument. Readers who can identify the structure of a text before reading comprehend it faster and more accurately. The AI generates a simple graphic organizer in text form that shows how the passage is organized and what relationship each section has to the main idea.

Main ideas and details

The guide has students record the main idea of the passage and a supporting detail as they read or after, and you can add a graphic organizer. For argumentative texts, an organizer you add can capture claim, evidence, and warrant. For informational texts, it can capture topic, main idea, and supporting details. For narrative texts, it can capture character, conflict, and resolution. The template stays the same, so you adapt the organizer to the text type.

ELL and below-grade-level reader support

The form has levels for English language learners and special education, for readers who must engage with grade-level texts regardless of their current reading level. The words to know line helps reduce the vocabulary barrier before reading. The main-idea prompts provide a check during reading. The question on how the text is organised gives a cognitive framework. All three together give struggling readers a genuine chance at comprehending a challenging text.

Who uses the reading comprehension helper

Reading intervention teachers use the tool to generate differentiated reading supports for students reading below grade level without producing a separately simplified text. All students in the class engage with the same passage, and the teacher decides how much support each student gets.

ELL teachers use the words to know prompt and their own notes on idioms to reduce the language barrier before engaging with academic content. The pre-reading preparation is especially valuable in science and social studies, where subject-specific vocabulary can stop an ELL student before they reach the content.

Special education teachers use the main-idea prompts for students with reading disabilities, executive function challenges, and working memory limitations. Stopping after each part can help the student catch confusion rather than reading through it.

Content-area teachers (science, history, math) who assign dense informational texts use the tool to generate reading supports without investing hours in creating them manually. A biology teacher can start a reading guide for a journal article summary from the form.