Cognitive functions are abilities, which allow a person to perceive, transmit, analyze and memorize information, i.e. interact with the environment. Eye movements represent relevant information about the functional state of some cognitive functions. A connection between eye-movements and cognitive processions is based on the anatomical and functional overlap of structures, which controlling them in different parts of the brain. Many forms of activity have a connection with eye-movements, including the reading. Reading skills are shaping by two components: reading technique (a motor component) and understanding text (cognitive component). The registration and interpretation oculomotor reactions are useful instruments for learning the reading process. Our research contains features of saccadic and fixation eye-movement components by elementary school-aged students 7-8 years old, who have an unsatisfactory understanding of the readable text, and selection of three groups by an answer quality. Identified differences between these three groups by the amplitude, speed, deceleration of pro- and regressive saccades, as well as the average duration of fixations per word. Based on the results, we describe three groups of schoolchildren, who have experienced difficulty understanding the meaning of a readable text or formulating an answer to a semantic question, by eye-movement parameters: not giving the answer, giving the wrong answer or coping with the task only after the prompt. The results provide to understanding different types of cognitive reading strategies, which are valuable to building children’s individual learning paths of reading skill for successful social functioning.