Decades of research offer important understandings about the nature of comprehension and its development. Drawing on both classic and contemporary research, in this article, we identify some key understandings about reading comprehension processes and instruction, including these: Comprehension instruction should begin early, teaching word-reading…

The Common Core State Standards and Response to Intervention are significant contemporary educational initiatives that have emerged largely in isolation from one another. We argue that an integration of these initiatives is beneficial. We trace the independent development of these two initiatives and offer suggestions for how they might fruitfully…

In the United States, new common state standards in English language arts and disciplinary literacy require K-12 students to "read and comprehend complex literary and informational texts independently and proficiently." Issues of text complexity have spurred debates in the mainstream literacy, educational practice, and policy…

In this article, we share with readers our hopes, fears, and predictions for reading assessment in American schools at a critical policy juncture--the production of new assessments to measure achievement of the Common Core State Standards. It isn't just Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers and Smarter Balanced…

This study investigates the efficacy of an integrated science and literacy approach at the upper-elementary level. Teachers in 94 fourth grade classrooms in one Southern state participated. Half of the teachers taught the treatment unit, an integrated science-literacy unit on light and energy designed using a curriculum model that engages students…

Researchers have reported that two types of instructional approaches--strategy instruction and high-level talk about text--lead to reading comprehension improvement in elementary-age students. One hypothesis is that both approaches have similar student outcomes because they develop high-level thinking about text. This article examines the…

Strong reading comprehension skills are central not only to academic and professional success, but also to a productive social and civic life. These skills build the capacity to learn independently, to absorb information on a variety of topics, to enjoy reading, and to experience literature more deeply. Despite the growing demand for highly…

This conceptual paper uses two literatures--the work examining the development of expertise in reading comprehension processes and the work on effective approaches to instruction--to build an instructional model for teaching reading comprehension strategies. The report assumes a constructivist view of both reading comprehension and social…

A reader's background knowledge (schemata) and purpose for reading have an overriding influence upon the reader's development of meaning. Reading comprehension also involves activating, focusing, maintaining, and refining ideas toward developing interpretations that are plausible, cohesive, and complete. Recent examinations of instructional…

The purpose of this naturalistic experiment was to discover the operative elements of an evidence-based reform effort that accounted for growth in student achievement. The reform was implemented in 13 schools around the United States over the course of two years. The authors studied the impact of both school-level programmatic elements and…

Reviews representative instructional studies of inference training, reciprocal teaching, and process training. Discusses both the concept of explicit comprehension instruction and potential difficulties in classroom implementation. Raises two important curricular concerns. (NH)

To evaluate different strategies for improving students' comprehension skills, particularly their inference ability, 42 fifth grade students identified as good or average readers were placed into one of three groups for an eight-week instructional period. Students in one group, the Content and Structure group, received systematic attention, story…

Cognitive research of the 1970s has shown that both content factors (topical world knowledge and knowledge about textual organization) and process factors (attention, encoding, inference, retrieval, and executive monitoring) influence comprehension. Classroom research during the same decade has shown that the greater the proportion of time…

The effects of various questioning strategies on reading comprehension were tested. The subjects, 24 second grade students reading at or slightly above their grade level, were divided into three instructional groups. The strategy group focused on integrating textual material with prior knowledge. The question group got a steady diet of inferential…

While listening comprehension is perhaps the most ignored area of the language arts, a review of the literature suggests that it is deserving of more classroom instructional time. Involving the simultaneous orchestration of skills in phonology, syntax, semantics, and knowledge of text structure, listening comprehension seems to be controlled by…