In 1988, middle schoolers who knew baseball understood a baseball passage better than stronger readers who did not. Knowledge did more than reading level.
What Recht and Leslie actually did
Donna Recht and Lauren Leslie asked 64 seventh and eighth graders to read a passage about a half inning of baseball. They split the kids by reading ability and by how much they already knew about baseball. Knowledge of the game predicted how much they remembered. Reading test scores did not rescue the kids who did not know baseball. The weaker readers who knew the game outperformed stronger readers who did not.
That finding is old and it keeps getting rediscovered. Comprehension is not a free-floating skill you can practice on random passages forever. The reader has to bring something to the page.
Strategy lessons have a ceiling
Teaching a child to highlight the main idea helps a little when they already understand the sentences. It does almost nothing when the passage is about a topic they have never met. Homeschool reading blocks that are only "read this and answer the questions" can hide a knowledge problem behind a strategy score.
The fix is not mysterious. Teach history, science, geography, and how things work. Then read about those same topics. The next passage gets easier because the child already has the furniture in their head.
- Pick a topic for a few weeks instead of a new random article every day.
- Read aloud the books that are richer than their decoding level.
- Ask what the passage assumes they already know, then go teach that.
- Stop treating reading class and knowledge as separate subjects.
This is good news at home
A classroom has to cover a district map. You can stay with the Civil War or the water cycle until the words start to mean something. That is one of the few clear homeschool advantages, and a lot of families give it away by hopping curriculum every month.
A comprehension game after the reading should ask about the passage they just met, not a generic skill with no content attached. If they miss the question, decide whether it was a decoding miss or a knowledge miss. Those are different repairs.