How to Teach for the Enhanced ACT Reading Test: 2025 Skills, Shifts, and Classroom Practices
Every Tuesday on The Scoreboard, we share practical, high-impact strategies to help teachers integrate ACT prep directly into Tier I instruction. Designed for Alabama educators and beyond, Tuesday Playbook connects strong classroom teaching to ACT College Readiness Benchmarks—turning daily lessons into measurable growth. From grammar warm-ups to critical reading routines, these easy-to-run “plays” help teachers build ACT-ready classrooms where every move counts.
Beginning in September 2025, the ACT Reading section underwent some of its most significant updates in a decade. While the heart of the test remains the same — measuring how well students understand, interpret, and evaluate complex texts — the structure and skills emphasis are shifting in ways that require intentional changes to Tier I instruction.
This guide outlines what’s changing, why it matters, and the specific classroom strategies teachers can implement to strengthen students’ readiness.
What’s Changing in ACT Reading?
1. Fewer questions & Shorter Passages
The enhanced version of reading goes from 40 questions to 36 questions and has an increase of five minutes, going from 35 minutes to 40 minutes.
This change gives students more time per question, increasing from approximately 53 seconds to 67 seconds.
2. More Text Variety
The enhanced test includes:
The Enhanced Reading Test will still include 4 passages, but only 3 of them will factor into a student’s score. (Important! This eliminates any strategy that may have been taught/used before, where students completed fewer than 4 passages based on how they performed on each. If the skipped passage is one that is scored, this will tank a student’s reading score.)
A blend of literary narrative, informational, and argumentative texts
Reading passages will also include graphics such as charts, tables, and graphs.
Increased emphasis on cross-disciplinary reading skills aligned with science and social studies literacy
Instructional impact: Students must build stamina for reading and demonstrate transfer of reading strategies across genres.
3. Clearer, More Specific Question Stems
Like the English test redesign, every Reading question now includes a full question stem. No more simple line references with vague expectations.
Question types now fall more clearly into three domains:
• Key Ideas & Details
(main idea, textual evidence, inferences, relationships)
• Craft & Structure
(word meaning, POV, text structure, rhetoric)
• Integration of Knowledge & Ideas
(comparing arguments, evaluating claims, analyzing multiple perspectives)
Instructional impact: Students must learn to read the question type as carefully as the text itself.
Teachers should explicitly teach question patterns and stems.
3. Evidence-Based Reading is Now Central
Many questions now require:
selecting an answer
andchoosing the line(s) that best support it
Instructional impact: This mirrors SAT-style evidence pairs and elevates the importance of text-dependent justification in instruction.
4. Increased Cognitive Rigor
The enhanced ACT Reading focuses more on:
subtle inferences
author’s logic
evaluating claims
understanding complex syntax
interpreting quantitative information embedded in text (charts, tables)
Why These Changes Matter for Instruction
These shifts align directly with research from Hattie and ACT’s own college-ready benchmarks:
Complex text exposure (ES = 0.62)
Reading comprehension strategy instruction (ES = 0.60–0.73)
Explicit teacher clarity (ES = 0.84)
Collective teacher efficacy (ES = 1.57)
Retrieval and spaced practice for vocabulary (ES = 0.72)
The message is clear: Tier I literacy instruction is ACT preparation.
Students don’t need more test prep—they need more strategic, intentional reading every day.
High-Impact Classroom Strategies for the New ACT Reading
Below are practical approaches teachers can implement immediately.
1. Use “Cold Reads” Intentionally
Once a week, provide students with an unfamiliar passage (500–800 words) and ask them to:
identify the main idea
annotate for structure
mark evidence that supports an argument or idea
answer 5–7 questions by domain (Key Ideas & Details, Craft & Structure, and Integration of Knowledge & Ideas)
Why this works: It builds stamina and develops flexible application of reading strategies.
2. Teach Students to Read Like Test Makers
Model how to:
predict wrong answers
eliminate distractors using logic (partial truth, extreme language, unsupported claims, etc.)
match answer choices to text evidence, not intuition
Instructional Strategy: Do a quick daily warm-up by showing a single question with 4 answer choices — ask students which one is the trap and why.
3. Annotate With a Purpose, Not a Highlighter
Teach a 3-mark system:
MI → Main idea
EV → Evidence
SHIFT → Change in tone, argument, or idea
Why this works: This process is aligned to ACT stems like: “How does the author develop their argument?” and “What shift occurs between paragraphs 3 and 4?”
4. Embed ACT-Aligned Reading Skills in Content Areas
The Reading exam now reflects Science and Social Studies literacy expectations.
Examples:
Studying POV in ELA → analyzing bias in history
Analyzing structure in ELA → evaluating a method in science
Identifying claims & evidence → lab reports and argumentative writing
Why this works: Cross-disciplinary consistency boosts retention
5. Teach Sentence-Level Comprehension
The enhanced test includes longer, more complex syntax.
Classroom moves:
“Unpack” complex sentences (subject → verb → modifiers → claims)
Use micro-close reads of one paragraph
Model how to paraphrase dense academic language
Why this works: Strong sentence comprehension unlocks passage comprehension.
6. Make Text-Evidence Justification a Daily Routine
Use:
sentence stems (“According to paragraph 3…”)
evidence logs
color-coded claims and support
structured debates using only textual evidence
Why this works: This directly prepares students for the new evidence-pair questions.
7. Build Vocabulary Through Context
This is SO important. The ACT Reading section is no longer using those “SAT word lists” of old. The ACT is using common, everyday language in uncommon ways. Students must be able to determine the word meaning as it is used in context.
Prioritize:
Tier II academic vocabulary
roots, affixes, signal words
analyzing how authors use words rhetorically
Instructional Strategy: A 2-minute “Meaning from Context” bell ringer each day yields compounding returns.
8. Practice “Read Less, Think More”
Teach students to:
predict the answer to the question before reading the answer options
search the text with a purpose
recognize when an answer is lifted from the text, but doesn’t answer the question
This is the #1 skill of high scorers.
Tips for Teachers Preparing Students for the Enhanced Reading Section
Use released ACT passages when possible
Build question banks by domain rather than by individual test
Teach timed practice (8–9 minutes per passage)
Encourage “mark and move” habits for difficult questions
Use data trackers to identify domain weaknesses
Reinforce that Reading is a thinking test, not a speed test
Conclusion: Strong Literacy = Strong ACT Scores
The enhanced ACT Reading test is not just a new format — it reflects a broader shift toward deeper comprehension, strategic reasoning, and evidence-based thinking.
When teachers embed:
complex texts
strong reading strategies
explicit domain-aligned instruction
structured practice with evidence
students become not just better test takers — but stronger readers overall.
