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Boost Students' Verbal Reasoning With 4 Strategies
Katrina Freund
July 30, 2025
Learning verbal reasoning skills can play a crucial role in your students’ lives, from helping them in the classroom to setting them up for future professional success. Though typically rolled into ELA instruction, you can teach verbal reasoning with any cross-curricular literacy lesson, and it’s often a key component of K-12 state summative assessments and higher education entrance exams like the SAT, GRE, or GMAT.
Today, we’re looking at what verbal reasoning is, exploring its importance, and providing actionable strategies to help you teach it in the classroom.
Verbal reasoning is the ability to understand and logically work through concepts and problems expressed in words.
When students have strong verbal reasoning skills, they can extract, interpret, and work with the meaning and implications from a text. They’re able to think constructively and go beyond just recognizing vocabulary or demonstrating simple fluency.
This skill is essential for helping students grasp complex information, engage in meaningful discussions, and draw logical conclusions across various subjects.
What verbal reasoning is not
When we assess students on verbal reasoning, we evaluate how well they can apply the skills rather than the knowledge they’ve learned from a specific text. When students are assessed on their verbal reasoning skills, all the information they need is found within the given text or passage. They shouldn’t need extensive subject or background knowledge to give an answer.
Additionally, verbal reasoning doesn’t evaluate students’ writing skills or abilities. While good writing does rely on students having sufficient language skills, the focus of verbal reasoning is on how well students process and work with written material. It’s not a measure of their ability to articulate written messages.
Key components of verbal reasoning
Verbal reasoning lessons, activities, and assessments teach and measure a range of cognitive, literacy, and linguistic skills, including:
Reading fluency and comprehension: The ability to understand the meaning of individual words, sentences, paragraphs, or longer texts.
Vocabulary knowledge: Understanding the meanings of a wide range of words and recognizing relationships between them, such as synonyms, antonyms, and homonyms.
Logical reasoning and problem-solving: The ability to identify patterns, analyze information, draw logical conclusions, and apply rules.
Critical thinking: The ability to evaluate arguments, recognize biases, identify logical inconsistencies, and make judgments based on textual information.
Attention to detail: The ability to carefully process information and identify specific details.
[Why do students need to learn verbal reasoning?](id-why)
Verbal reasoning is a key component of effective communication and sound decision-making. Students need to learn and practice their verbal reasoning skills throughout K-12 education to:
Improve cognitive development
Verbal reasoning enhances critical thinking and improves communication. It also fosters creativity and aids decision-making. When students learn verbal reasoning, they build their cognitive development through understanding and evaluating information, identifying biases, and articulating ideas more clearly and persuasively.
Aid academic success
Verbal reasoning is a key component of many summative assessments, higher education admissions tests, and even some K-12 school entrance exams. But it’s not just about getting a good score on these exams. It’s about the skills they measure.
When students have strong verbal reasoning skills, they can understand and analyze complex written material. This is such a highly assessed skill because students are expected to read, understand, summarize, and synthesize increasingly complex material as they progress through school.
If they want to understand the subjects they’re learning, apply the knowledge they gain, and engage in thoughtful discussions with others on these topics, they need to have strong verbal reasoning skills.
Prepare for professional and workplace success
Approximately 60% of companies use verbal ability tests during the recruitment and interview process. Recruiters and hiring managers do this to find candidates with advanced communication skills who can understand complex information associated with the available jobs.
Fields like law, education, finance, and engineering, among others, require strong communication and problem-solving skills. Advanced verbal reasoning skills can be an indicator that students may perform well in these areas.
Beyond specialized fields, strong verbal reasoning is crucial to completing many day-to-day tasks in any role. Analyzing reports, drafting emails, providing customer service, or making data-driven decisions all rely on verbal reasoning skills.
[4 tips to develop and improve students’ verbal reasoning skills](id-tips)
You can help your students improve their verbal reasoning skills with consistent practice and strategic approaches. Try:
1. Building strong reading habits
Regularly reading a wide range of texts across subjects and genres is one of the best long-term strategies to prepare students for verbal reasoning success.
Encourage students to read a variety of texts, including fiction and nonfiction works such as news articles, short stories, poetry, biographies, and more, across different subjects and topics (all available across Newsela’s products, too!). This helps expand vocabulary and expose students to varied language and complex passages.
Beyond reading a lot and often, encourage students to become actively engaged in what they read. This can be achieved by teaching them to ask questions, summarize what they read, and identify the main ideas, the author’s intent, and implied meanings.
2. Focusing on targeted skill development
Specific focus on certain skills can help students improve their verbal reasoning. Try explicit instruction on:
Vocabulary: Encourage learning new words daily throughout all your lessons and with explicit instruction. Using targeted tools can help students better understand word associations, including synonyms and antonyms.
Grammar and syntax: Help students understand different aspects of grammar, such as parts of speech, and how they work together to form logical sentences.
Critical thinking nuances: Teach students to identify absolute words in a passage—such as “always” or “never”—and understand their meaning in context. You can also teach students about the differences in correlation and causation that they may encounter when reading a text.
3. Using word games and puzzles
Building verbal reasoning skills doesn’t have to be boring. Playing vocabulary or word games or having students work on word puzzles can help them build verbal reasoning skills without even realizing it.
Games like Taboo or Pictionary can help students build their vocabulary and draw conclusions about potential words based on the information shown on the board. Crosswords, word searches, and even Sudoku games can help students practice sequences and attention to detail.
4. Engaging in structured assessment practice
While teaching verbal reasoning isn’t all about “teaching to the test,” it can help prepare students to apply their knowledge in the ways summative assessments or entrance exams may require them to use their skills. You can prepare students for popular verbal reasoning assessment question types, like:
True/False: Read a passage followed by a series of statements and choose if each statement is true, false, or if there’s not enough information to answer.
Synonyms and antonyms: Identify words with similar or opposite meanings.
Analogies: Identify relationships between word pairs and apply that relationship to other pairs.
Sentence completion: Fill in the blanks in a sentence to ensure logical and grammatical coherence.
Reading comprehension: Answer questions about the main idea, purpose, tone, or specific details in a passage.
Critical reasoning: Evaluate arguments and identify assumptions, strengths, weaknesses, and logical flaws.
Sequences and codes: Solve numerical sequences, letter sequences, or letter-word codes.
Word puzzles: Evaluate scrambled words, choose the odd word out, find hidden words, or complete word ladders.
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