Comprehension traces its meaning back tot he Greek roots of “weave” and in many ways the metaphor works. Someone must decode a text, combine the sounds and meanings with what they already know and form new understandings.

To understand comprehension means understanding humanity. No one has accomplished the task because you can not separate a culture teaching literacy and the learning of the culture. To change how a culture teaches understanding thus changes a culture. This in turn cane make changing teaching dangerous to cultural norms.

We also have to understand what we say when we mean comprehension. Do we mean the discrete ability to summarize a text or to “truly comprehend” a subject? Our schools focus on a definition of comprehension steeped in the academic language favored in Western European discourse patterns.

Throughout the History of Reading Research we can see an evolution knowledge of “reading as a process to construct meaning”*. We see reading comprehension change as differences emerge in Common Theoretical Frameworks.These elements influence our, “knowledge of reading comprehension and analysis skills.”

Reading comprehension, in its modern form, began in the late 1970s and early 1980s. In the late 1970s psychologist such as Flavel (1978) began to write about metacognition. Vygotsky, A Russian art critic, psychologist, and linguist got translated to English from Soviet Russia for the first time. These conditions combined with Influences from informational processing theories, using the computer as a metaphor for the mind.

Information Processing theory suggests we have long term memory like a hard drive, which organizes information in schemas. We have auditory and visual inputs that decode meaning into our short-term memory like RAM. Our “processes” or reading strategies combine the new information with existing schema like a computer program.

The first studies to really kick off reading studies began with Palinscar and Brown in 1984. They tried to identify the general “thinking skills” involved in reading that cut across all general thinking tasks and decided on:

• questioning
• summarizing
• clarifying
• predicting

This research continued to evolve as reading comprehension was viewed as a problem solving endeavor over and above decoding. In fcat starting in third grade decoding explainthe variance in reading accuracy but not comprehension.

Variables grouped under a large umbrella of “oral language skills” such as background knowledge and vocabulary explain comprehension ability.

Comprehension, unlike phonemic awareness and phonics is a often seen as a strategy and not a skill. According to Paris, Wasik, and Turner (1991) we teach skills to automaticity. Strategies take explicit monitoring of understanding and goal setting.

This line of work in reading comprehension research shares research in chess players from information processing theories studies. These chess studies compared the problem solving stategies of experts and novice players. Researchers then applied Expert Readers and Strategic Thinking to reading comprehension.

Skills and strategies turn to repeated behaviors over time. We refer to these as dispositions. Taking a critical stance, for example, is a disposition. It can involve skills such as quickly identifying an author and strategies of comparing multiple sources to verify claims.

Recent research in disciplinary literacies suggest these dispositions may actually involve more encularated practices and that “comprehension” requires learning the ways of being of a specific discipline. Not simply understanding or comprehending a science text book but knowing how a scientist would use the concepts in their every day talk in a way that signifies membership.

Today researchers question the emphasis on strategic teaching versus increasing the Role of Background Knowledge. After decoding background knowledge explains the greatest variance in scores of reading comprehension. This means knowing how much someone knows about a topic predicts how well they understand a reading after controlling for their ability to decode the text.

If you know about trout fishing you understand an article about trout fishing.

In students below third grade we build background knowledge through oral language skills. This builds up skills and strategies around Vocabulary and Comprehension

The teaching of Comprehension and Strategy Instruction is still central in many classrooms. We know from meta-analysis (Rosenshine, 1994) that strategy instruction has moderate to strong effects. This means that the teaching intervention moved scores of comprehension measures further from a mean score without an intervention.

In strategy instruction students are taught to apply specif procedural steps when encountering a text such as skimming a text before reading the book. Overtime an agreed set of 8-10 comprehension strategies has emerged.

Yet people note that the interventions have a low ceiling. Meaning additional practices in strategies may not yield future improvement. Once you know how to summarize a paragraph more practice will not make you better. In other words you “hit the ceiling.”The strategies also suffered from transfer issue. This means making predictions in a novel may not transfer to a science textbook. The studies also relied often on researcher created instruments measuring very discrete skills.

Yet at the same time special education literacy experts stress the importance of strategy instruction. The additional focus on general comprehension skills rooted in Palinscar and Brown's reciprocal teaching may explain why students with language goals in their Individual Education Plan have higher effect sizes in comprehension strategy instruction research,

We can never truly know what someone understands about a text. Instead we build comprehension through text based analysis and text-based discussions. The quality of teacher talk matters more in younger grades but as students age more and more of the discussion time revolving what is read should happen with students.

As teachers we plan to increase the cognitive complexity through three Levels of Reading Comprehension: literal, inferential, and evaluative questions. In early grades we accomplish this through interactive read-alouds and dialogical reading.

As a teacher you want to focus students written responses, annotations, and discussions around these levels.

The Common Core State Standards put a greater emphasis on a specific school of literary critique that focuses on Close Reading. The focus is on multiple readings that focus on meaning, structure and author's craft without “leaving the four corners of the page.”

As teachers we often use writing activities to promote and measure comprehension. In fact you have to be careful to make sure you are measuring comprehension and not conflating a writing measure. In other words does the paragraph measure as student's ability to write or the understanding of the texts.

There are multiple Literary Response and Analysis Skills with Narrative Texts that we can use in writing activities to promote literary response and analysis.

Literary Response Skills with Informational Texts are also greatly stressed in the Common Core State Standards. These writing activities promote reading comprehension.

Multimodal Texts

FORT Objective: knowledge of reading as a process to construct meaning

Internet Research

FORT Objective: application of strategies to electronic texts (0007)

English Language Learners