How to Write Effective Guided Reading Comprehension Questions
We make a lot of confessions here at Three Heads, and we’ve got another one for you today.
For years, we assigned reading comprehension questions because “that’s just what English teachers do.” We didn’t put much thought into why we were assigning them or what we were asking. We Googled “reading comprehension questions for [insert text here]” or pulled them from our textbook and called it a day.
Even worse? We knew these reading comprehension questions weren’t particularly helpful.
If you’ve ever tried to assign the reading comprehension questions from your textbook, you know they’re written to reflect specific content standards or research-based pedagogical practices, not what real students need in real time, especially students who are below grade level or don’t like to read.
We came to realize that good reading comprehension questions (or as we like to call them, guided reading questions) are incredibly valuable. But to be valuable, they must be written thoughtfully, which isn’t something most of our credential programs teach us to do.
So today, we’re digging into the steps we follow to write effective reading comprehension questions. But first, we need to consider their purpose.
What Is the Purpose of Reading Comprehension Questions?
When we stepped back to consider why we were assigning reading comprehension questions, it made an enormous difference in our approach to teaching all students of all levels.
Our students needed, essentially, someone to guide them through their reading of a text. They didn’t need to fill out a worksheet after finishing a story; they needed help understanding the story as they read it.

We first had this realization with our AP Literature students, strangely enough. For our first few years teaching AP Literature, we assigned students to read a novel and come to class prepared to discuss it. This was, after all, what our college professors did, and AP Lit is intended to replicate the rigor of a college-level class.
But this was a disaster. Many students didn’t read, and those who read didn’t really understand what they had read. We were ready to help students analyze the novel, but that’s hard to do when they can’t even describe the basic plot. Part of the problem, we realized, is that we didn’t give students an indication of what they needed to pay attention to or look for; as a result, they read with the goal of merely getting to the end.
So we started assigning reading comprehension questions for students to answer as they read (which is why we referred to them as GUIDED reading questions). For our most diligent students, this helped them process their reading, but for all students, we saw increasing engagement with at least some parts of the text.
As we continued to refine our guided reading assignments (for students of all levels), we realized it was essential to keep their purpose in mind. These questions are not to assess students’ literary analysis skills: that was for the class discussion and the close reading and writing assignments that followed. The purpose for these questions was to ensure students had a basic understanding of the story so they were prepared for the higher-level work they’d do with us in class.
Our Basic Format for Reading Comprehension Questions
To effectively guide students through a text, we need to ask a decent number of questions on each guided reading assignment (10–15 is ideal for one assignment, whether it’s a short story or a section of a novel, though for more challenging texts like Shakespeare where students need a lot more guidance, we usually end up with closer to 20 on each assignment).
Traditionally, reading comprehension questions are assigned as short-answers. We want our students to articulate their own understanding of a text, often in at least one complete sentence.
But grading, much less providing feedback on, short-answer responses takes a lot of time. We spent hours scoring responses on Actively Learn (a platform we loved because we could embed questions directly in the text and monitor students’ performance in real time). And when we started allowing students to revise their responses, the workload doubled, becoming unmanageable with multiple classes of 40-ish students.
So we started making most questions on each assignment multiple-choice and selecting one question for which students would construct a response (usually one that is particularly important or tied to later close reading and analysis). That way, we still drew students’ attention to all the key points we wanted to cover, but the grading load became much more manageable.
This also allowed us to ask students to write regularly without creating massive, intimidating assignments (both for our students and ourselves). Including a 5C paragraph on every guided reading assignment became an essential part of our strategy to teach writing to our students of all levels.
Was this the perfect solution? Of course not. It’s much easier for students to cheat or guess on a multiple-choice assignment. But it was a compromise that worked for us: students were still directed to important parts of the text, and we could hold them accountable for the quality of at least one answer. (We also set the point values so that the short-answer questions were worth more than the multiple-choice.)
The Benefit of Crafting Your Own Reading Comprehension Questions
The more we worked on our guided reading assignments, the more we moved away from already published questions and toward writing our own. There are a few key reasons we found this approach beneficial:
- We were rewriting most of our already published questions anyway. It took a lot of clarifying to construct questions that our students, many of whom were second-language learners or reading below grade level, could answer independently.
- We could tailor our guided reading assignments to match our end goals. It’s unrealistic to cover every single thing in a text, particularly a novel (a hard lesson we learned with a massively unwieldy Pride and Prejudice unit). By constructing the assignments ourselves, we could focus on those parts of the text that would best prepare students to be successful in the assignments we had coming for them later in the unit.
- We could make it harder for students to find answers online. If we can find questions on Google, so can our students. When we write our own questions, students are less able to copy and paste the question into their search bar and come up with the exact response we’re looking for. Even if they do find an answer, they have to do a little bit more work to find it.
But crafting your own reading comprehension questions is not as easy as it sounds. Since readers have asked us how, exactly, we create our guided reading question assignments, we’re sharing our step-by-step process.
A Step-by-Step Guide for Creating Guided Reading Comprehension Questions
Step 1: Identify Your End Goal
It’s impossible to ask students every single thing there is to note about a text, especially a novel. At some point, you have to narrow it down, so we always start by deciding where we want to go with a text or unit before we start writing.
This can look different for different units. Sometimes we focus on the end product: ensuring our students pick up the details they’ll need to write an essay about how Elie Wiesel changes over the course of his memoir Night. Other times, we focus on the genre: highlighting the hero’s journey archetype in the Odyssey or characteristics of a dystopia in The Hunger Games. And sometimes we focus on a theme, guiding our students to compare the different marriages Austen presents throughout Pride and Prejudice.
Of course, this means you need some familiarity with the text before you begin reading. In an ideal world, you’ve read the full book before you begin this process, but at minimum, we recommend doing a little bit of Internet research.
Step 2: Chunk the Text Into Manageable Assignments
If you’re creating a guided reading assignment for a short story, this probably doesn’t apply. And for a play written in five acts or a novel with less than ten chapters, it’s easy enough to create one assignment per act or chapter.
But for a longer novel, you’ll need some sort of strategy for chunking the text. Our go-to strategy for most assignments is to use the audiobook timestamps to work out how much students can read in a class period or in about 30 minutes of at-home reading. We either create an assignment for each “one-day” chunk or group a few together based on how long we plan to give students to work on it.
Step 3: Read the Text and Take Notes
Once you’ve divided your text into chunks, you’re ready to start on the guided reading assignment for the first chunk.
As we read, we take notes on key points we might want to ask about. At this point, our notes might look like “Reaping and tesserae (13) – possible short answer???” or “Significance of dandelion (32)” or “Illusion of utopia (59) – Capitol is beautiful but at the expense of the districts.”
Our preferred strategy here is to take notes on a Google Doc: this makes your notes easy to manipulate later and avoids creating annotations in your book that you don’t end up using.
Here’s what we look for:
- Key plot points or sections of the text that we plan to discuss in class and want our students to be familiar with
- Areas of potential confusion: If we know students will struggle with a section of the text, we make sure to guide them through it. We also like to ask about frequent misinterpretations of the text. For example, in Romeo and Juliet, we made sure to ask what Juliet meant by “Wherefore art thou, Romeo?” since students often assume she is looking for Romeo rather than lamenting that his name is Romeo.
- Areas that point directly toward your end purpose: When we wrote our Odyssey questions, we made notes about elements of the hero’s journey; when we wrote our Hunger Games questions, we made notes when we saw characteristics of a dystopia.
- Particularly meaningful passages and quotations
- Moments when we’ve gone too long without a question: When students are reading a particularly challenging passage, we do our best to include a question after every few paragraphs or exchanges of dialogue. This helps our students to focus and clarify meaning without getting too overwhelmed, and it discourages them from skipping the passage (especially if it’s essential to understanding the meaning of the work).
Step 4: Narrow Down Your Questions and Select a Short-Answer
If you’re like us, you’ve identified more things you could ask about than you need (or should include).
We do our best to limit ourselves to about 10-ish questions per assignment. We give ourselves a little bit more latitude with Shakespeare (aiming for around 20 multiple-choice questions) because the questions tend to be more straightforward and we know students will need more help understanding the basic plot points and grappling with the language.
As we’re making our choices, we prioritize four things:
- Questions that directly relate to our end goal or theme
- Questions that are “need to know” plot points or that will help students understand a particularly challenging passage
- Questions that build students’ cultural toolkits (like the balcony scene in Romeo and Juliet)
- Questions that won’t necessarily be in an online summary: We try to include a few questions that force students to engage with the book itself instead of Google.
It’s essential to keep our purpose in mind here. It’s tempting, as English teachers, to focus on every cool turn of phrase or literary technique we find, but if our goal is to help students understand the text, we have to restrain ourselves to the points that are most going to help them, not the nitpicky details.
It’s also a good idea at this stage to identify which of your 10-ish questions will be your short answer question. We tend to look for (a) the most important question; (b) a question worthy of some analysis and explanation; (c) a question where there might be room for multiple interpretations; or (d) a question for which students could provide multiple pieces of supporting evidence.
Step 5: Write Your Multiple Choice Questions
We like to write our multiple choice questions first, mostly because they feel easier than writing the short-answer question. They’re not, however, as easy to write as you might think, and there are some things we’ve learned to pay attention to as we craft our questions.
Look for reasonable detractors from the text.
We like to look for detractors that our students might actually be tempted to choose if they’re not reading carefully, so we try to write detractors based on the surrounding paragraphs or things that happened earlier in the text.
Look for areas of potential misunderstanding.
Since our goal is to help students understand the text, we try to include detractors that students might actually choose if they haven’t understood what they’re reading. This is, for example, why we like to ask about the “Wherefore art thou, Romeo?” line. If students don’t take a moment to look up “wherefore,” they’ll misunderstand what Juliet is asking, and the fact that she’s asking why he has to be named Romeo is important to the plot.

Look for assumptions students who didn’t read might make.
We know that not all students are going to read. So we like to include detractors that are based on a difference between the book and the movie or that a student who’s only read an online summary might select. For example, when we wrote questions for The Hunger Games, we asked about Katniss’s feelings about Peeta. Students who are culturally aware of the story are likely to assume she’s in love with Peeta, but the reality is that she’s conflicted, so asking about it is a good way to reward those students who are actually reading.
Think through your wording.
One of the hardest parts about writing multiple-choice questions is making sure there is only one clear right answer. It’s surprisingly easy to write detractors that are technically true or that a student might reasonably infer is true. It takes time and practice to get good at this, but it’s an essential skill when it comes to making fair and helpful assignments for your students.
Pro Tip: When you’re writing your questions, be thoughtful about whether you want to include page numbers. Sometimes, it’s worth it: you’re trying to model appropriate citations, you want to ensure students refer to the right passage, you want to provide clear guidelines about where to start and stop, or you have students who need extra support. However, know that including page numbers, especially with a novel, means you’ll have some students who jump straight to the answers and don’t actually read.
Step 6: Write Your Short-Answer Question
Crafting an effective short-answer question requires similar care to ensure students give you the responses you’re looking for. We’ve learned, through much painful trial and error, to tell our students exactly what we want to see in their responses, which requires a little more work during the planning stage.
- Write an initial draft.
- Start crafting your answer key that you’ll compare students’ responses to.
- Look closely at your response: would a student reasonably come up with something similar, or is this what you, as the professional, consider a full answer?
- Look back at your question: did you actually ask for the answer you wanted?
- If, like us, you like to provide your students with scaffolding or specific directions, craft sentence starters or sentence-by-sentence directions that will help your students respond exactly the way you want them to.
Step 7: Pilot Your Questions
If, like us, you’re lucky enough to work closely with a colleague you trust, the person who didn’t write the initial draft should look over the questions. This is a valuable way to find places where you haven’t been clear or asked a question that doesn’t necessarily lead to the response you want.
Then, when you assign your questions to your students, pay attention to common mistakes, especially on the short-answer question. When multiple students make the same mistakes over and over, this is a valuable cue that something isn’t clear, and you can revise your questions for the next year.
Step 8: Be Thoughtful About Your Grading Plan
As our thinking on reading comprehension questions has evolved, we’ve needed to remind ourselves that the purpose of our assignments is to guide students through the text, not to assess their burgeoning literary analysis skills.
Remembering this helps significantly when we start to stress about the idea of students cheating. When we accept that the purpose of the assignment is to improve students’ familiarity with the text, we’re more able to accept that this may happen and make the assignment worth a limited number of points (or put it in the participation category of our grade), saving our attention for more valuable assignments.
Another thing we’ve found helpful is creating a clear scoring rubric for our short-answer questions to ensure consistency as we score student responses. We decide ahead of time what, exactly, we’re looking for so that we’re able to evaluate each response according to the same standards. If you collaborate with other teachers, we recommend doing this together before you begin scoring.
Guided reading assignments are an essential tool in helping students navigate challenging texts: they became the core of our class for many years, no matter what we were teaching. However, good reading comprehension questions take time, effort, and intentionality to create. We hope our guide gives you the framework you need to write questions that help your students be successful.
Save yourself the time and effort of writing your own reading comprehension questions by turning to us at Three Heads! We currently have units that include guided reading questions for Thomas Foster’s How to Read Literature Like a Professor, Homer’s Odyssey, Frank R. Stockton’s “The Lady, or the Tiger?” and William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and Julius Caesar.
Desperately hoping for good reading comprehension questions for another text? Let us know at [email protected] or on Instagram @threeheads.works.