Read the passage first, properly
There is a tempting shortcut: skim the questions, then hunt the passage for answers. It feels efficient and it usually costs marks, because the questions that need an overall sense of the piece — tone, the writer's attitude, why a character did something — cannot be answered by hunting.
Read the passage once, at a normal pace, without stopping to worry about unfamiliar words. The aim is to know what happened and roughly where things are. Then start the questions.
Most answers are in the text
Comprehension is not a memory test or a guessing game. For the majority of questions the evidence is sitting in the passage, and the skill is going back to find it rather than answering from a general impression.
Encourage a habit of pointing at the line that proves the answer. If your child cannot point to it, the answer is probably a guess — which is fine as a last resort, but worth knowing about.
The question types that catch children out
- "What does the word X mean in this passage?" — in this passage. A word can have several meanings and the surrounding sentence decides which one is being asked about.
- "Why did the character do that?" — asks for a reason, not a description of what they did.
- "How did the character feel?" — often not stated outright. The evidence is in what they said or did.
- "Which of these is NOT true?" — three correct statements and one wrong one. Children in a hurry pick the first true thing they recognise.
- "What is the main idea?" — a detail that appears in the passage can still be the wrong answer, because it is not the main one.
Answer the question that was asked
A surprising share of lost marks come from answering a slightly different question — giving what when asked why, or describing when asked to explain. Re-reading the question after choosing an answer catches most of these, and takes seconds.
Practising it
Comprehension improves through doing it and then talking about the wrong ones. After a passage, take two questions your child got wrong and ask what they thought the question wanted. Very often the reasoning was sound and the question was misread — a different problem, with a different fix.
Wider reading helps too, but slowly: it builds the vocabulary and the familiarity with how writing works that comprehension quietly depends on.
Read next
- Five-minute habits that add up
- P5, P6 or P7: when to start preparing
- Building vocabulary for the Transfer Test
Dates, scoring and assessment details are set by SEAG and can change — always confirm the current position on the official SEAG website. Our key dates page lists the 2026–27 milestones.