Sigma Educação e Tecnologia has identified that academic performance is affected by an issue that rarely emerges in discussions on the subject: difficulties with reading comprehension affect not only grades in Portuguese but also performance in mathematics, science, and history throughout a student’s entire academic journey.
The ability to understand content presented in different subjects, such as mathematics, science, or history, does not depend solely on specific knowledge, but also on the ability to interpret and analyze information objectively and critically. Without this foundation, subject matter becomes virtually inaccessible to students, regardless of how much effort they devote to studying.
This article explores how reading proficiency impacts performance across different areas of knowledge and explains why restricting reading instruction solely to Portuguese classes may conceal a significant part of the educational challenge faced by many students.
The analysis is guided by a direct and relevant question: Is it possible for a child to perform well across different subjects if they are unable to adequately understand what they read, regardless of the specific knowledge they may have about the subject at that particular moment?
Reading Is Not Just a Portuguese-Language Issue
Sigma Educação, a company specializing in the development of integrated educational solutions, has identified that interpreting mathematical problems is, above all, an exercise in reading. Students must clearly understand the teacher’s instructions before carrying out any mathematical operation.
A student who has mastered the four basic arithmetic operations but cannot identify which one to apply when faced with a multi-sentence problem is often classified as having limited mathematical ability. However, the real challenge may lie in understanding the wording of the problem.
Considering this scenario, Sigma Educação concludes that such diagnostic confusion can have practical consequences, including directing remedial instruction toward the wrong subject while the reading difficulty that originally caused the problem remains without specific intervention for several school years, with the underlying cause left unidentified.
The Relationship Between Limited Vocabulary and Comprehension in Science and History
In science, readers must have command of specialized vocabulary and the ability to follow a logical sequence of cause and effect presented across several interconnected sentences within the same paragraph. Reading a text about a particular experiment or natural phenomenon requires these skills.
Sigma Educação highlights that students with limited vocabulary may struggle to interpret connectives that signal this logic, such as “therefore” or “although,” compromising their understanding of the reasoning involved, even in relatively simple scientific contexts where reading proficiency is expected to have already been established.
In history, interpreting a source, comparing two accounts, or understanding the relationship between the causes and consequences of a particular event depends directly on the same reading proficiency required in other subjects—an aspect that is rarely discussed outside the time specifically allocated to Portuguese-language classes in the school curriculum.
Reading Comprehension Supports Performance Across All Subjects
Sigma Educação proposes an approach in which decoding, fluency, and comprehension are understood as distinct components of reading. A student may therefore decode words fluently without necessarily understanding the meaning of the text. This distinction is important because a student may read aloud without hesitation and still fail to comprehend the content, making the difficulty almost imperceptible to evaluators who focus solely on reading fluency in the classroom.
It is important to emphasize that science or mathematics teachers rarely have specific training to identify this type of difficulty, since the problem tends to manifest itself as an error in the subject being assessed at that moment rather than as a reading-related issue that the student may be silently struggling with.
Recognizing reading as a cross-curricular skill represents a significant shift in how learning difficulties are investigated. Before reinforcing mathematics or science content, it is essential to assess whether the student effectively understands what they are reading within each of these specific subjects.
