Effective Practices for Developing Reading Comprehension

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Reading comprehension research has a long and rich history. There
is much that we can say about both the nature of reading compre -
hension as a process and about effective reading comprehension in -
struction. Most of what we know has been learned since 1975.
Why have we been able to make so much progress so fast? We
believe that part of the reason behind this steep learning curve has
been the lack of contro versy about teaching comprehension.
Unlike decoding, oral reading, and reading readiness, those who
study reading comprehension instruction have avoided much of
the acrimony characteristic of work in other as pects of reading.
As it should be, much work on the process of reading compre-
hension has been grounded in studies of good readers. We know a
great deal about what good readers do when they read:
• Good readers are active readers.
• From the outset they have clear goals in mind for their reading.
They constantly evaluate whether the text, and their reading of
it, is meeting their goals.
• Good readers typically look over the text before they read, not-
ing such things as the structure of the text and text sections that
might be most relevant to their reading goals.
• As they read, good readers frequently make predictions about
what is to come.
• They read selectively, continually making decisions about their
reading—what to read carefully, what to read quickly, what not
to read, what to reread, and so on.
• Good readers construct, revise, and question the meanings they
make as they read.
• Good readers try to determine the meaning of unfamiliar words
and concepts in the text, and they deal with inconsistencies or
gaps as needed.
• They draw from, compare, and integrate their prior knowledge
with material in the text.
• They think about the authors of the text, their style, beliefs,
inten tions, historical milieu, and so on.
• They monitor their understanding of the text, making adjustments
in their reading as necessary.
• They evaluate the text’s quality and value, and react to the text in
a range of ways, both intellectually and emotionally.
• Good readers read different kinds of text differently.
• When reading narrative, good readers attend closely to the set-
ting and characters.
• When reading expository text, these readers frequently con-
struct and revise summaries of what they have read.
• For good readers, text processing occurs not only during “read-
ing” as we have traditionally defined it, but also during short
breaks taken during reading, even after the “reading” itself has
com menced, even after the “reading” has ceased.
• Comprehension is a consuming, continuous, and complex activ-
ity, but one that, for good readers, is both satisfying and productive.
(See Pressley and Afflerbach [1995] and Block and Pressley [2001]
for re views of much of the research on good readers’ comprehen-
sion. The in tellectual ancestor to this chapter is “Developing
Expertise in Reading Comprehension” [Pearson, Roehler, Dole, &
Duffy, 1992] in the second edition of What Research Has to Say About
Reading Instruction; this piece also provides a good overview of the
work upon which this characteri zation of good reading is based.)
Given knowledge about what good readers do when they read,
re searchers and educators have addressed the following question:
Can we teach students to engage in these productive behaviors?
The answer is a resounding yes. A large volume of work indicates
that we can help stu dents acquire the strategies and processes used
by good readers—and that this improves their overall comprehen-
sion of text, both the texts used to teach the strategies and texts
they read on their own in the future.
In this chapter, we will describe some proven instructional
techniques for helping students acquire productive comprehension
skills and strate gies. As you will see, there is a large if not over-
whelming number and range of techniques that work, yet the use
of even one technique alone has been shown to improve students’
comprehension. Teaching what we call collections or packages of
comprehension strategies can help stu dents become truly solid
comprehenders of many kinds of text.
BALANCED COMPREHENSION INSTRUCTION
To borrow a term from the decoding debate, comprehension
instruction should be balanced. By this we mean that good com-
prehension instruc tion includes both explicit instruction in spe-
cific comprehension strate gies and a great deal of time and
opportunity for actual reading, writing, and discussion of text.
The components in our approach to balanced comprehension
instruction are a supportive classroom context and a model of
comprehension instruction.
Effective Practices for Developing Reading Comprehension
nell k. duke, university of michigan and p. david pearson, university of california berkeley
From Farstrup, A. E., & Samuels, S. J. (Eds.) What Research Has to Say About Reading
Instruction (3rd ed.) (pp. 205–242). Copyright © 2002 by the International Reading
Association. Reprinted with permission of the publisher.
107

A Supportive Classroom Context
It is not enough just to offer good instruction. Several important
features of good reading instruction also need to be present. Oth-
erwise, the com prehension instruction will not take hold and
flourish. These features in clude the following:
•A great deal of time spent actually reading. As with decoding, all
the explicit instruction in the world will not make students
strong read ers unless it is accompanied by lots of experience
applying their knowledge, skills, and strategies during actual
reading.
•Experience reading real texts for real reasons. To become strong,
flex ible, and devoted comprehenders of text, students need
experience reading texts beyond those designed solely for read-
ing instruction, as well as experience reading text with a clear
and compelling pur pose in mind.
•Experience reading the range of text genres that we wish students to
comprehend. Students will not learn to become excellent com-
pre henders of any given type of text without substantial expe-
rience reading and writing it. For example, experience reading
storybooks will not, by itself, enable a student to read, under-
stand, and cri tique procedural forms of text of the sort found
in how-to books, instruction manuals, and the like.
•An environment rich in vocabulary and concept development through
reading, experience, and, above all, discussion of words and their mean-
ings. Any text comprehension depends on some relevant prior
knowledge. To some degree, well-chosen texts can, in them-
selves, build readers’ knowledge base. At the same time, hands-
on activi ties, excursions, conversations, and other experiences
are also needed to develop vocabulary and concept knowledge
required to understand a given text.
•Substantial facility in the accurate and automatic decoding of words.
In a recent review of the literature, Pressley (2000) argues
com pellingly that skilled decoding is necessary, although by no
means sufficient, for skilled comprehension.
•Lots of time spent writing texts for others to comprehend. Again, stu -
dents should experience writing the range of genres we wish
them to be able to comprehend. Their instruction should empha-
size con nections between reading and writing, developing stu-
dents’ abilities to write like a reader and read like a writer.
•An environment rich in high-quality talk about text. This should in -
volve both teacher-to-student and student-to-student talk. It
should include discussions of text processing at a number of
levels, from clarifying basic material stated in the text to draw-
ing interpretations of text material to relating the text to other
texts, experiences, and reading goals.
A Model of Comprehension Instruction
The model of comprehension instruction we believe is best sup-
ported by research does more than simply include instruction in
specific compre hension strategies and opportunities to read,
write, and discuss texts—it connects and integrates these different
learning opportunities. Specifically, we suggest an instructional
model including the following five components:
1. An explicit description of the strategy and when and how it should be
used. “Predicting is making guesses about what will come next
in the text you are reading. You should make predictions a lot
when you read. For now, you should stop every two pages that
you read and make some predictions.”
2. Teacher and/or student modeling of the strategy in action. “I am
going to make predictions while I read this book. I will start
with just the cover here. Hmm . . . I see a picture of an owl. It
looks like he—I think it is a he—is wearing pajamas, and he is
carrying a candle. I predict that this is going to be a make-
believe story because owls do not really wear pajamas and carry
candles. I predict it is going to be about this owl, and it is going
to take place at nighttime.
“The title will give me more clues about the book; the title
is Owl at Home. So this makes me think even more that this book
is going to be about the owl. He will probably be the main char-
acter. And it will take place in his house.
“Okay, I have made some predictions about the book based
on the cover. Now I am going to open up the book and begin
reading.”
3. Collaborative use of the strategy in action. “I have made some good
predictions so far in the book. From this part on I want you to
make predictions with me. Each of us should stop and think
about what might happen next. . . . Okay, now let’s hear what
you think and why. . . .”
4. Guided practice using the strategy with gradual release of responsibility.
Early on . . .
“I have called the three of you together to work on making pre-
dictions while you read this and other books. After every few
pages I will ask each of you to stop and make a prediction. We
will talk about your predictions and then read on to see if they
come true.”
Later on . . .
“Each of you has a chart that lists different pages in your book.
When you finish reading a page on the list, stop and make a pre -
diction. Write the prediction in the column that says ‘Predic-
tion.’ When you get to the next page on the list, check off
whether your prediction ‘Happened,’ ‘Will not happen,’ or ‘Still
might happen.’ Then make another prediction and write it
down.” (This is based on the Reading Forecaster Technique
from Mason and Au [1986] described and cited in Lipson and
Wixson [1991].)
5. Independent use of the strategy. “It is time for silent reading. As you
read today, remember what we have been working on—making
predictions while we read. Be sure to make predictions every
two or three pages. Ask yourself why you made the prediction
you did—what made you think that. Check as you read to see
whether your prediction came true. Jamal is passing out Predic-
tions! book marks to remind you.”
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Throughout these five phases, it is important that neither the
teacher nor the students lose sight of the need to coordinate or
orchestrate com prehension strategies. Strategies are not to be
used singly—good readers do not read a book and only make pre-
dictions. Rather, good readers use multiple strategies constantly.
Although the above model foregrounds a particular strategy at a
particular time, other strategies should also be ref erenced, mod-
eled, and encouraged throughout the process. A way of con -
ceptualizing the orchestration process is captured in a classic visual
model from Pearson and Gallagher’s (1983) early work on com-
prehension in struction. In that model (see Figure 10.1), teachers
move from a situa tion in which they assume all the responsibility
for performing a task while the student assumes none, which we
would call modeling or demonstrating a strategy (the upper left
corner), to a situation in which the students assume all the respon-
sibility while the teacher assumes none, which we would call inde-
pendent strategy use (lower right corner), a sit uation in which
teachers can shift to a participation mode, performing tasks in
much the same way as any other group member. Instruction in the
upper left corner would be labeled teacher centered, whereas
instruc tion in the lower right would be student centered.
Other Teaching Considerations
Choosing well-suited texts. Another important role for the teacher in
implementing this model is in choosing the texts to use. At least
some of the texts used during these different phases of compre-
hension instruction should be chosen to be particularly well suited
to application of the spe cific strategy being learned. Just as many
have recommended using texts in decoding instruction that
emphasize the particular sound-letter rela tionships students are
learning, we recommend linking closely the com prehension strat-
egy being taught to the texts to which it is initially applied and
practiced. For example, a good text for learning about the predic -
tion strategy would be one that students have not read before
(hence, they would not already know what happens next), that has
a sequence of events, and that provides sufficient clues about
upcoming events for the reader to make informed predictions
about them. Also, as is recom mended for decoding instruction, we
recommend careful attention to the level and demands of texts
used in different phases of instruction, espe cially the early phases.
When students are first learning a comprehension strategy, they
should encounter texts that do not make heavy demands in other
respects, such as background knowledge, vocabulary load, or
decoding. Later, of course, students must be asked to apply the
strategy to the range of texts they will meet during everyday read-
ing—in reading/language arts, in content area classes (i.e., social
studies, science, and mathematics), and on their own.
Concern with student motivation. The level of motivation students
bring to a task impacts whether and how they will use comprehen-
sion strate gies (Dole, Brown, & Trathen, 1996; Guthrie et al.,
1996). Therefore, the model we suggest, in particular the inde-
pendent practice portion, should be made as motivating to stu-
dents as possible. Accompaniments to com prehension instruction
we have already noted—such as providing experience reading real
texts for real reasons and creating an environ ment rich in high-
quality talk about text—will undoubtedly help. Other strategies
can be found in books, articles, and chapters devoted specifi cally
to the topic of motivation and engagement (e.g., Guthrie & Wig-
field, 1997).
Ongoing assessment. Finally, as with any good instruction, compre -
hension instruction should be accompanied by ongoing assess-
ment. Teachers should monitor students’ use of comprehension
strategies and their success at understanding what they read.
Results of this monitoring should, in turn, inform the teacher’s
instruction. When a particular strategy continues to be used inef-
fectively, or not at all, the teacher should respond with additional
instruction or a modified instructional approach. At the same
time, students should be monitoring their own use of comprehen-
sion strategies, aware of their strengths as well as their weaknesses
as developing comprehenders.
BUILDING A COMPREHENSION CURRICULUM
With this overall model for comprehension instruction as a back-
ground to be used in teaching any useful strategy, we now turn to
specific com prehension strategies that research has shown to be
effective in improv ing students’ comprehension of text. These are
the strategies we recommend explaining and modeling for students
109
EFFECTIVE PRACTICES FOR DEVELOPING READING COMPREHENSION
Percent of Task Responsibility Assumed
by the Teacher
0Percent of Task Responsibility Assumed
by the Student
100
100
0
Primarily Teacher
Modeling*
Direct
Instruction*
Region of Shared Responsibility
Participating*
Scaffolding*
Facilitating*
Guided Practice
Primarily
Student
Figure 10.1. Gradual release of responsibility.
As one moves down the diagonal from upper left to lower right,
students assume more, and teachers less, responsibility for task
completion. There are three regions of responsibility: primarily
teacher in the upper left corner, primarily student in the lower
right, and shared responsibility in the center. (This figure is
adapted with permission from Pearson and Gallagher [1983];
the asterisked terms are borrowed from Au & Raphael [1998].)

and then emphasiz ing in shared, guided, and independent reading.
The effectiveness of these strategies is not limited to a particular
age group. Age groups used in studies consulted for this review
range from kindergarten through college level. Certainly not every
strategy presented has been tested for this entire range of age
groups, but neither is there substantial evidence to indicate that any
strategy is inappropriate for any age range. First, we introduce six
important strategies, and then we review some “routines” that actu-
ally integrate several strategies in a single activity.
Effective Individual Comprehension Strategies
Prediction. We have labeled the first strategy prediction, although it
is better conceived as a family of strategies than a single, identifi-
able strat egy. At its core is making predictions and then reading to
see how they turned out, but it also entails activities that come
with different labels, such as activating prior knowledge, preview-
ing, and overviewing. What all these variants have in common is
encouraging students to use their existing knowledge to facilitate
their understanding of new ideas en countered in text. Although
these strategies have some earlier roots (e.g., Ausabel, 1968; Stauf-
fer, 1976, 1980), these activities are most clearly the legacy of the
1980s, with its emphasis on schema theory (Anderson & Pearson,
1984) and comprehension as the bridge between the known and
the new (Pearson & Johnson, 1978).
Although it might seem reasonable to expect research on pre-
diction and prior knowledge activation to be equally distributed
across narrative and expository text genres, it is decidedly biased
toward narrative texts (see Pearson & Fielding, 1991). Two activi-
ties dominate the work: mak ing predictions and activating prior
knowledge about story theme, con tent, or structure. Hansen’s
work (Hansen, 1981; Hansen & Pearson, 1983) provides rich
examples of prior knowledge activation. In both instances, stu-
dents were encouraged to generate expectations about what char-
acters might do based on their own experiences in similar
situations. This technique led to superior comprehension of the
stories in which the activity was embedded and to superior per-
formance for younger and less able older readers on new stories
that the students read without any teacher support. Working with
fourth-grade students, Neuman (1988) found that when teachers
presented students with oral previews of sto ries, which were then
turned into discussions and predictions, story comprehension
increased relative to “read only” previews and typical basal back-
ground-building lessons. In a creative variation of the preview
theme, McGinley and Denner (1987) had students compose very
short narratives based on a list of keywords from the upcoming
story. For ex ample, terms such as loose tooth, string, pain, baseball
game, tie score, and home run might serve as keywords for an upcom-
ing story about a girl who has a loose tooth that will not come out
but falls out naturally when she is engrossed in a close ball game.
Interestingly, the accuracy of their “prediction” stories proved rel-
atively unimportant in explaining subsequent comprehension of
the real stories; apparently, it was the en gagement itself that trig-
gered the deeper story comprehension.
Explicit attempts to get students to engage in prediction behav-
iors have proved successful in increasing interest in and memory for
stories (Anderson, Wilkinson, Mason, & Shirey, 1987). Fielding,
Anderson, and Pearson (1990) found that prediction activities pro-
moted overall story understanding only if the predictions were
explicitly compared to text ideas during further reading, suggest-
ing that the verification process, in which knowledge and text are
compared explicitly, may be as important as making the prediction.
These studies suggest a variety of productive ways of encour-
aging students to engage their knowledge and experience prior to
reading. They also suggest that in nearly all cases, the impact on
story under standing is positive, at least for narrative texts in which
themes and top ics are likely to be highly familiar. The situation may
be quite different in reading expository texts, especially if stu-
dents’ existing knowledge is riddled with misconceptions about
matters of science and prejudices in the realm of human experi-
ence (see, for example, Guzzetti, Snyder, Glass, & Gamas, 1993).
Think-aloud. Another proven instructional technique for improving
comprehension is think-aloud. As its name implies, think-aloud
involves making one’s thoughts audible and, usually, public—say-
ing what you are thinking while you are performing a task, in this
case, reading. Think-aloud has been shown to improve students’
comprehension both when students themselves engage in the prac-
tice during reading and also when teachers routinely think aloud
while reading to students.
Teacher think-aloud. Teacher think-aloud is typically conceived of as
a form of teacher modeling. By thinking aloud, teachers demon-
strate effective comprehension strategies and, at least as impor-
tantly, when and when not to apply them. For example, in the
following teacher think-aloud, the teacher demonstrates the use of
visualization and prediction strategies:
That night Max wore his wolf suit and made mischief of one kind and
another. . . . Boy, I can really visualize Max. He’s in this monster suit and
he is chasing after his dog with a fork in his hand. I think he is really start-
ing to act crazy. I wonder what made Max act like that . . . Hm-m-m . . . I
bet he was getting a little bored and wanted to go on an adven ture. I think
that is my prediction. (Pressley et al., 1992, p. 518)
Studies typically have not examined the effect of teacher think-
aloud by itself, but rather as part of a package of reading compre-
hension strate gies. Therefore, although we cannot infer directly that
teacher think-aloud is effective, it is clear that as part of a package,
teacher think-aloud has been proven effective in a number of stud-
ies. For example, teacher think-aloud is part of the Informed
Strategies for Learning (ISL) program (Paris, Cross, & Lipson,
1984), the reciprocal teaching approach (see later discussion), and
the SAIL program (see later discussion), all of which have been
shown to be effective at improving student comprehension. It is
also an important part of the early modeling stages of instruction
in many comprehension training routines, for example, the QAR
work of Raphael and her colleagues (Raphael, Wonnacott, & Pear-
son, 1983) and the inference training work of Gordon and Pearson
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(1983). These stud ies suggest that teacher modeling is most effec-
tive when it is explicit, leav ing the student to intuit or infer little
about the strategy and its application, and flexible, adjusting strat-
egy use to the text rather than pre senting it as governed by rigid
rules. Teacher think-aloud with these at tributes is most likely to
improve students’ comprehension of text.
Student think-aloud. Instruction that entails students thinking aloud
themselves also has proven effective at improving comprehension
(see Kucan & Beck, 1997, for a review). A classic study by Bere-
iter and Bird (1985) showed that students who were asked to think
aloud while read ing had better comprehension than students who
were not taught to think aloud, according to a question-and-
answer comprehension test. A compelling study by Silven and
Vauras (1992) demonstrated that stu dents who were prompted to
think aloud as part of their comprehension training were better at
summarizing information in a text than students whose training
did not include think-aloud.
Several scholars have theorized about why student think-aloud
is ef fective at improving comprehension. One popular theory is
that getting students to think aloud decreases their impulsiveness
(Meichebaum & Asnarow, 1979). Rather than jumping to conclu-
sions about text meaning or moving ahead in the text without hav-
ing sufficiently understood what had already been read,
think-aloud may lead to more thoughtful, strate gic reading. A
study conducted with third-grade students provides some empiri-
cal support for this theory. Baumann and his colleagues found that
training in think-aloud improved children’s ability to monitor their
comprehension while reading (Baumann, Seifert-Kessel, & Jones,
1992). Third-grade children trained to think aloud as they used
several com prehension strategies were better than a comparison
group at detecting errors in passages, responding to a question-
naire about comprehension monitoring, and completing cloze
items. One student trained in think-aloud explained, “When I read
I think, is this making sense? I might . . . ask questions about the
story and reread or retell the story” (Baumann et al., p. 159). This
and other student comments suggested a thoughtful, strate gic
approach to reading through think-aloud.
Text structure. Beginning in the late 1970s and extending through-
out the 1980s into the early 1990s, we witnessed an explosion of
research about the efficacy of teaching children to use the struc-
ture of texts, both narrative and expository, to organize their
understanding and recall of important ideas. Most of the research
emphasized the structural aspects of text organization rather than
the substance of the ideas, the logic be ing that it was structure, not
content, that would transfer to new texts that students would
meet on their own.
Story structure. The research on story structure uses a few consis-
tent heuristics to help students organize their story understanding
and recall. Usually, these are organized into a story grammar (see
Mandler, 1978; Stein & Glenn, 1979), or as it is commonly called
in instructional parl ance, a story map (see Pearson, 1981), which
includes categories such as setting, problem, goal, action, out-
come, resolution, and theme. Instruction typically consists of
modeling, guided practice, and inde pendent practice in recogniz-
ing parts of the stories under discussion that instantiate, or “fill,”
each category. Although there are situations, texts, and popula-
tions in which this sort of instruction does not appear help ful, in
the main, story structure instruction shows positive effects for a
wide range of students, from kindergarten (Morrow, 1984a,
1984b) to the intermediate grades (Gordon & Pearson, 1983;
Nolte & Singer, 1985) to high school (Singer & Donlan, 1982) to
special populations (Idol, 1987), and to students identified as
struggling readers (Fitzgerald & Spiegel, 1983). Regarding trans-
fer, although the effects are complex and sometimes subtle, it
appears the effects are most stable for the texts in which the
instruction has been embedded (Singer & Donlan, 1982), and they
do transfer to new, independently read texts (Gordon & Pearson,
1983; Greenewald & Rossing, 1986).
Informational text structure. Most of the research establishing the
pos itive impact of helping students learn to use the structural fea-
tures of in formational texts as aides to understanding and recall
has been conducted since the appearance of elaborate text analy-
sis schemes in the late 1970s (e.g., Kintsch & Van Dijk, 1978;
Meyer, 1975; see also Meyer & Rice, 1984, for a complete review
of this early work). The early work documented the significance of
attention to text structure, pointing out that students—for what-
ever reasons, including the fact that they are simply better read-
ers—who are more knowledgeable about text structure recall
more textual information than those who are less knowledgeable
(Bartlett, 1978; Meyer, Brandt, & Bluth, 1980). The work also sug-
gested that knowledge is not enough. Students must actually fol-
low the text’s structure in build ing their recall for the effect to be
realized; not surprisingly, more good than poor readers are
inclined to do so (Bartlett, 1978; Taylor, 1980).
The approaches to teaching text structure have exhibited sub-
stantial variability, beginning with general attempts to sensitize
students to structural elements (e.g., Bartlett, 1978; Davis, Lange,
& Samuels, 1988; Slater, Graves, & Piche, 1985) and extending to
hierarchical summaries of key ideas (e.g., Taylor & Beach, 1984)
and to visual representations of key ideas, such as conceptual
maps, semantic networks, charts, and graphs (e.g., Armbruster &
Anderson, 1980; Armbruster, Anderson, & Ostertag, 1987; Gal-
lagher & Pearson, 1989; Geva, 1983; Holley & Dansereau, 1984).
In general, the research suggests that almost any ap proach to
teaching the structure of informational text improves both com-
prehension and recall of key text information. One plausible
expla nation is that systematic attention to the underlying organi-
zation, whether intended by the authors of texts or not, helps stu-
dents relate ideas to one another in ways that make them more
understandable and more memorable. Another plausible explana-
tion is that it is actually knowledge of the content, not facility with
text structure,that children acquire when they attend to the struc-
tural features of text. In other words, text structure is nothing
more than an alias for the underlying structure of knowledge in
that domain.
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EFFECTIVE PRACTICES FOR DEVELOPING READING COMPREHENSION

Only a few of the studies in this area have evaluated these com-
peting hypotheses. The results of the Gallagher and Pearson
(1989) work suggest that both content and structural features con-
tribute to the salutary effects of “text structure” instruction. Over
a series of several weeks, Gallagher and Pearson taught fourth-
grade students, mainly poor readers, to apply a consistent struc-
tural framework, instantiated as a set of matrix charts and
flowcharts, to their reading and discussion of short books about
dif ferent social insects (ants, bees, and termites). The outcome
measures included several independently read passages, each pas-
sage successively more distant from the original social insect
books. They read, in order, a passage about a fourth social insect,
the paper wasp, a passage about a hu man society, and a passage
about geographic formations such as gulfs, capes, peninsulas, and
the like. As the conceptual distance between the original set of
books and the testing passages increased, the effect of the inter-
vention (compared with a group who read the same texts and
answered questions and with a group that only read the texts)
decreased in magnitude, but was still statistically significant, sug-
gesting that students were learning something about (a) insect
societies, (b) social organiza tion in general, and (c) how to unearth
the structure of an informational text. From a classroom teacher’s
perspective, there is some comfort in knowing that content
knowledge and text structure are naturally inter twined; after all,
either or both represent legitimate curricular goals.
Visual representations of text. There is an old saying that a picture is
worth a thousand words. When it comes to comprehension, this
saying might be paraphrased, “a visual display helps readers under-
stand, or ganize, and remember some of those thousand words.”
Compare the short text on digestion to the flow chart in Figure
10.2. The text is verbal, abstract, and eminently forgettable; by
contrast, the flowchart is visual, concrete, and arguably more
memorable.
That said, we readily admit that when it comes to the use of
visual representations of text, it is difficult, perhaps impossible, to
specify ex actly what it is that students attend to and learn when
teachers use them as heuristic devices to aid in comprehension and
recall. The ubiquitous use of semantic maps and webs reveals this
ambiguity. Consider, for ex ample, the web in Figure 10.3.
This could be a graphic summary of an article about coyotes.
Or, it could be a map of an individual’s (or a whole class’s collec-
tive) knowledge about coyotes. Or, it could be a heuristic device
used by a teacher to teach key vocabulary in a unit on scavenging
animals. In a practical sense, as we pointed out in discussing text
structure instruction, it does not really matter. To the contrary, we
would expect tools and activities that improve comprehension to
also enhance knowledge of text structure and vocab ulary acquisi-
tion. The point about visual representations is that they are re-pre-
sentations; literally, they allow us to present information again. It is
through that active, transformative process that knowledge, com-
pre hension, and memory form a synergistic relationship—what-
ever im proves one of these elements also improves the others.
Much of the research cited in the previous section on text struc-
ture applies to the use of visual displays. Most notable, because of
their consistent use of visual displays over an extended time period,
is the work of Armbruster, Anderson, and Ostertag (1987) and Gal-
lagher and Pearson (1989). Armbruster and colleagues (1987)
employed the heuris tic of a general frame to assist students in learn-
112 JOURNAL OF EDUCATION • VOLUME 189 • NUMBERS 1/2 • 2008/2009
Figure 10.2. Text versus visual representation.
Food
enters
mouth
Teeth break
food into
small bits
Nutrients pass through
intestine wall into
bloodstream and then
to the entire body
Waste passes out of
body through intestine
Food is broken
down even more
in the stomach,
creating nutrients
and waste
Swallow and
food travels
through tube
into stomach
Text describing the digestive process:
When you eat, you use your teeth to break food apart into tiny particles.
These pieces mix with saliva to become a kind of mush. When you swal-
low, the food goes through a tube into your stomach, where it is
digested. During digestion, your body breaks down the food into smaller
and smaller bits. The food contains things your body needs, which we
call nutrients. As the food passes from the stomach into the intestine,
the nutrients pass through the walls of the intestine into your blood-
stream. Your bloodstream carries these nutrients to all parts of your
body. The part of the food that is not digested, which we call waste,
passes out of the body through the intestine.
Flowchart of the digestive process:
Figure 10.3. A semantic map of the concept, coyotes.
Famous
Coyotes
Relatives
Habitats
Food
Natural
Enemies
Ways to
Harm Humans
Ways to
Help Humans
Rodents
Garbage
The Trickster
Humans
Forests
Deserts
Cities
Wolves
Dogs
Hyenas
Coyotes

ing from expository text. For example, in history, a conflict frame
is useful in organizing many his torical phenomena: One side wants
X, the other wants Y, their desires collide in some sort of conflict
(war, debate, political battle), and some sort of resolution, often
tentative, is reached. In their approach to teach ing frames, Arm-
bruster and her colleagues (Armbruster et al., 1987; Armbruster,
Anderson, & Meyer, 1990) have identified and successfully taught
students, usually at the middle school level, to use several generic
frames as tools for organizing what they are learning from their
read ing, among them frames for depicting conflicts, cause-effect
relations, descriptions, explanations, and procedures. The effects in
this work are usually quite dramatic in improving understanding
and recall for the texts in which the instruction is embedded; trans-
fer effects to new pas sages read without assistance or without the
requirement that the frames be used is much less impressive.
An exception to the transfer effect finding is the work of Gal-
lagher and Pearson (1989), described earlier in conjunction with
text structure instruction. Recall that although transfer decreased
as a function of con ceptual distance from the original information
domain (insect societies), it was nonetheless significant even for
passages on unrelated topics. What may be central in this sort of
instruction, besides consistent and persistent guidance in how and
why to use the visual displays, is direct involvement in construct-
ing the visual display along with compelling feedback to the stu-
dents in the form of evidence that the arduous effort involved in
re-presenting information pays off in terms of learning and, in the
case of older students, better grades.
Summarization. Teaching students to summarize what they read is
an other way to improve their overall comprehension of text.
Dole, Duffy, Roehler, and Pearson (1991) describe summarizing
as follows:
Often confused with determining importance, summarizing is a
broader, more synthetic activity for which determining impor-
tance is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition. The ability to
summarize in formation requires readers to sift through large units
of text, differenti ate important from unimportant ideas, and then
synthesize those ideas and create a new coherent text that stands
for, by substantive criteria, the original. This sounds difficult, and
the research demonstrates that, in fact, it is. (p. 244)
Indeed, most people with relevant experience will agree that
summariz ing is a difficult task for many children. Many children
require instruc tion and practice in summarizing before they are
able to produce good oral and written summaries of text. Inter-
estingly, research suggests that instruction and practice in summa-
rizing not only improves students’ ability to summarize text, but
also their overall comprehension of text content. Thus, instruction
in summarization can be considered to meet dual purposes: to
improve students’ ability to summarize text and to im prove their
ability to comprehend text and recall.
There are at least two major approaches to the teaching of sum-
ma rization. In rule-governed approaches, students are taught to
follow a set of step-by-step procedures to develop summaries. For
example, McNeil and Donant (1982) teach the following rules,
which draw from the work of Brown, Campione, and Day (1981)
and Kintsch and Van Dijk (1978):
Rule 1: Delete unnecessary material.
Rule 2: Delete redundant material.
Rule 3: Compose a word to replace a list of items.
Rule 4: Compose a word to replace individual parts of an
action.
Rule 5: Select a topic sentence.
Rule 6: Invent a topic sentence if one is not available.
Through teacher modeling, group practice, and individual prac-
tice, stu dents learn to apply these rules to create brief summaries
of text.
Other approaches to summarizing text are more holistic. One
that has been the subject of research is the GIST procedure (Cun-
ningham, 1982). In GIST, students create summaries of 15 or
fewer words for in creasingly large amounts of text, beginning with
single sentences and working incrementally to an entire paragraph.
As Cunningham de scribes it, GIST is conducted first as a whole
class, then in small groups, and finally on an individual basis.
Working with sixth-grade students, Bean and Steenwyk (1984)
stud ied the effectiveness of McNeil and Donant’s set of rules pro-
cedure and Cunningham’s GIST procedure. They found that ver-
sions of both ap proaches were effective not only in improving
students’ written sum maries of text, but also in improving their
comprehension of text as measured by a standardized test. Despite
being markedly different, the two approaches were roughly equal
in their effectiveness, and both were superior to a control tech-
nique that involved only practice in writing summaries based on
the main ideas in text.
Perhaps one of the reasons why both McNeil and Donant’s and
Cunningham’s summary procedures are effective is that they are
both consistent with an overall model of text processing that itself
has stood the test of validation: Kintsch and Van Dijk’s (1978)
model of text com prehension posits that text is understood
through a series of identifiable mental operations. These opera-
tions are necessary for understanding both the local and the more
global meaning of text within the constraints of working memory,
the reader’s goals, and the structure of the text. Although a thor-
ough description of these operations is beyond the scope of this
chapter, they essentially involve a series of deletions, inferences,
and generalizations, much like those required by the summarizing
proce dures later used by McNeil and Donant.
Questions/questioning. No comprehension activity has a longer or
more pervasive tradition than asking students questions about their
reading, whether this occurs before, during, or after the reading
(see Durkin, 1978, for compelling evidence of the ubiquity of this
practice). We also know much about the effect of asking different
types of questions on students’ understanding and recall of text,
with the overall finding that students’ understanding and recall can
be readily shaped by the types of questions to which they become
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EFFECTIVE PRACTICES FOR DEVELOPING READING COMPREHENSION

accustomed (the classic review is Anderson & Biddle, 1975, but see
also Levin & Pressley, 1981; Pressey, 1926; Rickards, 1976). Thus,
if students receive a steady diet of factual detail questions, they
tend, in future encounters with text, to focus their efforts on fac-
tual details. If teachers desire recall of details, this is a clear path-
way to shaping that behavior. If, by contrast, more general or more
inferential understanding is desired, teachers should emphasize
ques tions that provide that focus. When students often experience
questions that require them to connect information in the text to
their knowledge base, they will tend to focus on this more integra-
tive behavior in the fu ture (e.g., Hansen, 1981).
Although the impact of questions on comprehension is impor-
tant, for our purposes, the more interesting questions are (a)
whether students can learn to generate their own questions about
text and (b) what impact this more generative behavior might
have on subsequent comprehen sion. The research on engaging
students in the process of generating questions about the texts
they read, although not definitive, is generally positive and
encouraging (see Rosenshine, Meister, & Chapman, 1996, for a
review). Raphael and her colleagues (Raphael & McKinney, 1983;
Raphael & Pearson, 1985; Raphael & Wonnacott, 1985) carried
out perhaps the most elaborate line of work on question genera-
tion in the mid-1980s. Using a technique called QARs (Question-
Answer-Relationships), Raphael and her colleagues modeled and
engaged stu dents in the process of differentiating the types of
questions they could ask of text. Students learned to distinguish
among three types of ques tions: (1) Right There QARs were those
in which the question and the an swer were explicitly stated in the
text, (2) Think and Search QARs had questions and answers in the
text, but some searching and inferential text connections were
required to make the link, and (3) On My Own QARs were those
in which the question was motivated by some text element or
item of information, but the answer had to be generated from the
stu dents’ prior knowledge. Through a model of giving students
ever-increasing responsibility for the question generation,
Raphael and her colleagues were able to help students develop a
sense of efficacy and con fidence in their ability to differentiate
strategies in both responding to and generating their own ques-
tions for text.
Later research by Yopp (1988) indicated that when students
learn to generate questions for text, their overall comprehension
improves. In a variation that wedded the logic of QARs with the
work on story schemas (e.g., Singer & Donlan, 1982), Yopp studied
three different groups that varied in terms of who was taking the
responsibility for question gener ation. In the first group, the
teacher asked the questions; in the second, the students generated
their own; in the third, the students generated their own and were
provided with a metacognitive routine (in the man ner of QAR) for
answering their own questions. The second and third groups per-
formed better on posttests given during instruction and af ter the
instruction had ended, suggesting that student control of the ques-
tioning process is a desirable instructional goal. Furthermore, al -
though it did not translate into higher performance on the
comprehen sion assessments, the third group, those who received
the additional metacognitive routine, were better at explaining the
processes they used to answer questions.
Perhaps the most compelling evidence for the efficacy of teach-
ing students to generate their own questions while reading comes
from the research cited in the subsequent section in which we
move from individual strategies to comprehension routines. The
three routines described—reciprocal teaching, transactional
strategies instruction, and Questioning the Author—are all
research-based approaches to teaching comprehension that, as a
part of their overall approach, teach students how to ask questions
about text. That the question-generation strategy works so well as
part of a larger and more comprehensive routine sug gests that
when it is implemented in classrooms, it is probably better to use
it not as a steady routine repeated for every text encountered, but
as an activity that is regularly but intermittently scheduled into
guided or shared reading.
Summary of the six individual comprehension strategies. To summarize,
we have identified six individual comprehension strategies that
research suggests are beneficial to teach to developing readers:
prediction/prior knowledge, think-aloud, text structure, visual
representations, summa rization, and questions/questioning.
Although somewhat different ter minology is used, these strategies
were also identified by the recent National Reading Panel (NRP)
report (2000), commissioned by the U.S. Congress to evaluate
research in the area of beginning reading. The NRP report also
identified “Comprehension Monitoring” and “Cooperative Learn-
ing” as effective comprehension strategies. We address compre -
hension monitoring to some degree in the section covering
think-aloud. We view cooperative learning as an instructional
medium rather than a comprehension strategy, and therefore have
not included it in our analy sis. However, the assumption of collab-
orative work among students and between the teacher and stu-
dents is implicit in the overall approach to comprehension we
recommend in the first section of this chapter, as well as in the
comprehension routines discussed later.
A great deal of research suggests that vocabulary and compre-
hension are inextricably linked. Thus, strategies related to ascer-
taining the mean ing of unknown words, as well as general
vocabulary building, are also es sential to a strong program in com-
prehension instruction.
Effective Comprehension Routines
In this section we move from individual strategies—highly specific
processes that might be embedded into essentially any discussion of
text and combined with other strategies—to what we have termed
com prehension routines. By using the term routine, we mean to
capture the idea of an integrated set of practices that could be
applied regularly to one text after another, and in the process, pro-
vide students with two ben efits: (1) better understanding of the
texts to which the routines are ap plied, and (2) the development of
an infrastructure of processes that will benefit encounters with
114 JOURNAL OF EDUCATION • VOLUME 189 • NUMBERS 1/2 • 2008/2009

future text, especially texts that students must negotiate on their
own. One of these routines, transactional strategies in struction,
borders on being a complete comprehension curriculum. We have
chosen to focus on three routines—reciprocal teaching, transac -
tional strategies instruction, and Questioning the Author (QtA)—
although there are other research-tested practices that might be
characterized also as routines, such as the Directed Reading-Think-
ing Activity (DR-TA) (e.g., Baumann et al., 1992) and Informed
Strategies for Learning (Paris, Cross, & Lipson, 1984).
Reciprocal teaching. Four comprehension strategies—predicting,
ques tioning, seeking clarification, and summarizing—are the focus
of the re ciprocal teaching approach. Originally developed by
Annemarie Palincsar (1982; also Brown & Palincsar, 1985; Palinc-
sar & Brown, 1984), recipro cal teaching involves a gradual release
of responsibility from teacher to student for carrying out each part
of the routine. In the early stages of the reciprocal teaching, the
teacher does much modeling of the target com prehension strate-
gies. In some versions of reciprocal teaching, this in cludes direct
teaching of each individual strategy and the use of worksheets for
practice strategies (e.g., Palincsar, Brown, & Martin, 1987). As
time goes on, students assume increasing control over strategy use,
eventually using the strategies with little or no teacher support.
A typical reciprocal teaching session begins with a review of the
main points from the previous session’s reading, or if the reading
is new, pre dictions about the text based on the title and perhaps
other information. Following this, all students read the first para-
graph of the text silently to themselves. A student assigned to act
as teacher then (a) asks a question about the paragraph, (b) sum-
marizes the paragraph, (c) asks for clarifi cation if needed, and (d)
predicts what might be in the next paragraph. During the process,
the teacher prompts the student/teacher as needed, and at the end
provides feedback about the student/teacher’s work.
Reciprocal teaching sessions are intended to take approximately
30 minutes, and they can include more than one student in the role
of teacher each session. Although typically conducted in small
groups, re ciprocal teaching has been conducted in one-to-one and
whole-group formats. The approach has been used with both good
and struggling readers. The following dialogues come from recip-
rocal teaching ses sions with students struggling with the technique:
T: What would be a good question about pit vipers that starts
with the word why?
S: (No response)
T: How about, “Why are the snakes called pit vipers?”
———
S: How do spinner’s mate is smaller than. . . . How am I going
to say that?
T: Take your time with it. You want to ask a question about
the spin ner’s mate and what he does, beginning with the
word how.
S: How do they spend most of his time sitting?
T: You’re very close. The question would be “How does the
spinner’s mate spend most of his time?” Now you ask it.
———
T: That was a fine job, Ken, but I think there might be some-
thing to add to our summary. There is more information
that I think we need to include. This paragraph is mostly
about what?
S: The third method of artificial evaporation. (Palincsar &
Brown, 1984, p. 138)
This next dialogue comes from a first-grade class employing
recip rocal teaching.
S1: My question is, what does the aquanaut need when he goes
under water?
S2: A watch.
S3: Flippers.
S4: A belt.
S1: Those are all good answers.
T: Nice job! I have a question too. Why does the aquanaut
wear a belt? What is so special about it?
S3: It’s a heavy belt and keeps him from floating up to the top
again.
T: Good for you.
S1: For my summary now: This paragraph was about what
aquanauts need to take when they go under the water.
S5: And also about why they need those things.
S3: I think we need to clarify gear.
S6: That’s the special things they need.
T: Another word for gear in this story might be equipment,
the equip ment that makes it easier for the aquanauts to do
their job.
S1: I don’t think I have a prediction to make.
T: Well, in the story they tell us that there are “many strange
and won derful creatures” that the aquanauts see as they do
their work. My prediction is that they’ll describe some of
these creatures. What are some of the strange creatures
you already know about that live in the ocean?
S6: Octopuses.
S3: Whales?
S5: Sharks!
T: Let’s listen and find out. Who’ll be our teacher? (Palincsar
& Brown, 1986, p. 771)
The important role of the teacher as guide is evident through-
out the dialogues. In addition to the modeling and scaffolding rep-
resented here, the teacher routinely reminds students of why
these strategies are im portant and how they will help students in
their reading.
Many studies have investigated the effectiveness of reciprocal
teach ing. Rosenshine and Meister (1994) reviewed 16 studies of
the technique and concluded that reciprocal teaching is effective at
improving compre hension of text. This was evident from both
experimenter-developed comprehension tests and, to a lesser
extent, from standardized tests of comprehension. In another
review of research on the approach, Moore (1988) also found
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EFFECTIVE PRACTICES FOR DEVELOPING READING COMPREHENSION

reciprocal teaching to be effective across multiple studies. Recipro-
cal teaching has been compared with many other ap proaches to
comprehension instruction, including teacher modeling alone,
explicit instruction and worksheets alone, daily practice at reading
test passages and answering accompanying questions, and training
at locating information to address different kinds of comprehension
questions. In all cases, reciprocal teaching was found to be a more
effec tive approach. (An innovation on reciprocal teaching known as
Collaborative Strategic Reading [CSR] has also been shown to be
effec tive in multiple research studies, including studies of the
approach’s effectiveness with English Language Learners. For more
information about this approach, see Klinger and Vaughn [1999].)
Students Achieving Independent Learning (SAIL) and other transac tional
strategies approaches. The Students Achieving Independent Learning,
or SAIL, program also teaches a package of comprehension strate-
gies. Used in Montgomery County, Maryland, USA, strategies
em phasized in SAIL include predicting, visualizing, questioning,
clarifying, making associations (e.g., between the text and the stu-
dents’ experiences), and summarizing (Pressley et al., 1994). Use
of these strategies is taught through teacher think-aloud and
explicit instruction. Students practice the strategies in various set-
tings, with an emphasis on student interpre tation of text. Indeed,
SAIL and a similar program used at the Benchmark School in
Media, Pennsylvania, USA, have been characterized as transac -
tional strategies instruction because of their emphasis on transac-
tions among teacher, student, and text (Pressley et al., 1992).
In SAIL, the emphasis is on helping students learn when to use
which comprehension strategies. The program uses a range of dif-
ferent kinds of texts that are often quite challenging for students
because they are at or above grade level. Consider this summary of
a SAIL lesson from a fourth-grade classroom:
• Teacher asks students to write a prediction about what the book
will be about based on its cover.
• Teacher begins reading the book, thinking aloud as she reads
(e.g., “I wonder if that is the Georgetown in Washington, D.C.”;
“August must be the name of a person”).
• Students take turns reading aloud. As students read, the teacher
cues students to apply strategies as appropriate (e.g., “Tell us
what has been going on here”).
• Students spontaneously employ strategies they have learned in
pre vious work, including seeking clarification, relating the text
to their lives, and visualizing (e.g., “I can see a . . .”).
• Students return to their written predictions to assess their
accuracy.
As this summary suggests, there is not a predetermined
sequence of strategies to use in SAIL lessons. Rather, strategy use
depends on the situation; students must coordinate their reper-
toire of comprehension strategies. Also, more attention is given to
individual interpretation of text than to “right answers.” Figure
10.4 lists the menu of strategies that can be used in transactional
strategies instruction. Two features of the list are worth noting:
First, it incorporates all the strategies within reciprocal teaching
(on the cognitive side of the ledger). Second, the list is long
enough to guarantee selective application (based on the text and
the learning context) to any given text. There is no way that a
teacher could ensure that each strategy was applied to every text
encountered by a group of students.
Much of the research on SAIL and its intellectual cousin, trans-
actional strategies instruction, has been qualitative, looking in detail
at the ways that strategies are taught and learned. These studies sug-
gest that SAIL and similar programs offer a promising approach to
comprehension instruc tion, with rich, motivating interactions
around text and increasing so phistication of student strategy use
over time. One quasi-experimental study of SAIL has confirmed
the effectiveness of the approach at im proving student comprehen-
sion (Brown, Pressley, Van Meter, & Schuder, 1996). In the study,
second-grade students in SAIL classrooms outper formed students
in comparable non-SAIL classrooms on standardized measures of
both reading comprehension and word attack. Students in SAIL
classrooms also remembered more content from their daily lessons
than students in non-SAIL classrooms. Additional evidence for the
effi cacy of this “family” of transactional strategy instruction rou-
tines can be found in Pressley’s (1998) recent review.
Questioning the Author. Beginning in the early 1990s, Isabel Beck and
Margaret McKeown, along with a group of colleagues at the Uni-
versity of Pittsburgh and in the surrounding schools, began work
on a com prehension routine called Questioning the Author (QtA).
Inspired by their own insights (see Beck, McKeown, Sandora, &
Worthy, 1996, p. 386) in revising text to make it more considerate
(Beck, McKeown, & Gromoll, 1989), Beck and her colleagues
116 JOURNAL OF EDUCATION • VOLUME 189 • NUMBERS 1/2 • 2008/2009
Figure 10.4. Basic components of transactional
strategies instruction.
Cognitive Strategies Interpretive Strategies
Thinking aloud Character development
Imagining how a character
might feel
Identifying with a character
Constructing images Creating themes
Summarizing Reading for multiple meanings
Predicting Creating literal/figurative
(prior knowledge activation) distinctions
Questioning Looking for a consistent point
of view
Clarifying Relating text to personal
experience
Story grammar analysis Relating one text to another
Text structure analysis Responding to certain text
features such as point of view,
tone, or mood
Strategies in italics are also a part of reciprocal teaching.

bootstrapped this approach to engaging students with text. The idea
was that if they, as knowledgeable adult readers, found the process
of trying to figure out what authors had in mind in writing a text
in a certain way helpful, perhaps students would benefit from
querying the author in a similar spirit. Hence, they developed a set
of “generic questions” that could be asked as a teacher and group of
students made their way through a text. The essential ap proach is to
query a text collaboratively, section by section, with ques tions like
those listed in Figure 10.5 as a guide.
The expectation is that students who receive this sort of
approach to text inquiry will develop improved understanding of
the texts to which the routine is applied, improved understanding
of texts they meet on their own at a later time, and most impor-
tant, a critical disposition to ward texts in general. Ideally, this
approach will help students to enter tain the possibility that a com-
prehension failure may have as much to do with the author’s fail-
ure to provide a considerate message as it does with the failure of
the reader to bring appropriate cognitive and affective re sources to
bear in trying to understand it.
The data on the efficacy of Questioning the Author (Beck et al.,
1996) are encouraging. First, with the support of a professional
community, teachers can learn to transform their text discussions
from traditional recitations to these more student-centered, inter-
pretive, and decidedly critical discussions. Second, when the rou-
tine is implemented, students assume a greater role in the overall
text discussions, nearly doubling their piece of the discussion pie
(compared with traditional discussions), and they initiate many
more interactions. Third, and most important, stu dents become
much more successful at higher order comprehension and moni-
toring their comprehension as a result of participating in Ques-
tioning the Author. It is equally empowering to teachers and
stu dents. Those who wish to implement this approach should con-
sult the works that Beck and her colleagues have written for class-
room teachers (Beck, McKeown, Hamilton, & Kucan, 1997).
WHERE WILL COMPREHENSION RESEARCH GO? SOME
CHALLENGES
There are many who believe that the kind of intense attention that
has been aimed at issues of decoding, particularly in recent years,
will soon turn to comprehension. Although this is desirable in
terms of bringing attention to an often “quiet” literature and
increasing the extent to which teachers, parents, and administra-
tors think about how they teach (or fail to teach) comprehension,
it is worrisome in light of the character of the decoding debates.
Questions that worry us include the following:
• Will comprehension be understood in all of its complexity?
Even the brief description at the beginning of the chapter of
what good readers do when they read makes it clear that com-
pre hension is complex. It has been difficult to convince many
that de coding entails more than simply letter-by-letter “sounding
out.” It may also be difficult to convince many that comprehen-
sion is more than just listening to the words you decode to see if
they make sense, and that it involves many different processes,
that it entails a multiplicity of different strategies, and that it
means different things in different contexts.
• Will we acknowledge that comprehension-learning is different
for different people?
Awareness of individual differences continues to be lacking in
much discourse on decoding. Will it be lacking in discourse on
comprehension? Will we come to terms with the notion that
effec tive comprehension requires different kinds and amounts
of in struction and experiences for different learners?
• Will our definition and fundamental understanding of compre-
hen sion keep pace with the changing nature of text?
We still tend to characterize comprehension of text, and read -
ing in general, as a linear process. This is true even though we
know that good readers, whether adults or children, do not
read even tra ditional texts linearly. Readers routinely skip
ahead to sections of a text that they believe are most relevant
to their reading goals or re turn to reread sections they first
encountered much earlier in the reading. Some texts, such as
computer manuals, magazines, and cookbooks, are almost
never read from front to back. Even novels, although often read
front to back, are sometimes read nonlinearly. A reader
recently described to one of us how he usually skips de scriptive
117
EFFECTIVE PRACTICES FOR DEVELOPING READING COMPREHENSION
Goal Candidate
Initiate the discussion • What is the author trying to say?
• What is the author’s message?
• What is the author talking about?
Help students focus on the
author’s message
• That is what the author says, but
what does it mean?
Help students link information • How does that connect with what
the author already told us?
• What information has the author
added here that connects to or fits
in with . . .?
Identify difficulties with the
way the author has presented
information or ideas
• Does that make sense?
• Is that said in a clear way?
• Did the author explain that clearly?
Why or why not? What’s missing?
What do we need to figure out or
find out?
Encourage students to refer to
the text either because they’ve
misinterpreted a text statement
or to help them recognize that
they’ve made an inference
• Did the author tell us that?
• Did the author give us the answer
to that?
Figure 10.5. Questions to guide the discussion in
Questioning the Author.

parts of each chapter, but returns to them if he gets the feeling
he has missed an important detail. With the growing use of
hypertext, Web links, and texts that are really webs of many
loosely coupled but independently generated texts, increasingly
more ma terial will have to be read in a nonlinear style. In the
future, text nav igation may be linked with text comprehension.
• Will we question long-held or favorite assumptions about effec-
tive reading comprehension instruction?
For example, we are guilty of routinely recommending that
stu dents read “real texts for real purposes” in the course of
their read ing comprehension instruction, although there is lit-
tle or no research to support this recommendation directly.
Research cer tainly shows that children can develop strong com-
prehension using authentic texts, but there is little or no
research investigating whether, for example, reading compre-
hension skills develop better or more quickly when students
are reading authentic texts rather than texts written solely for
comprehension instruction. There is also little or no research
investigating whether reading compre hension abilities develop
better when students are reading texts for reasons that go
beyond simply learning to read. We suspect (in deed we believe)
that both genuine texts and authentic purposes are important
aspects of quality comprehension instruction, and in the face of
missing evidence, we will continue to recommend both, but
neither can be unequivocally recommended with the force of
com pelling empirical evidence.
• Will we ask questions about the optimal numbers and kinds of
comprehension strategies to teach?
As noted throughout this chapter, we now know of a number
of effective strategies, but we also suspect that there is a point
of diminishing returns. If two well-taught, well-learned strate-
gies are better than one, are three better than two, four better
than three, and so on? Again, the field could continue to focus
on developing additional effective strategies, but perhaps our
attention is better fo cused on refining and prioritizing the
strategies we already have.
• Will we ask the tough questions about reading comprehension
instruction?
In 1978, Dolores Durkin published her famous (perhaps infa -
mous) study documenting the paucity of comprehension
instruc tion and explicit strategy explanations in elementary
classrooms. As our review documents, in the last 20 years we
have learned a lot about how to ameliorate the situation Durkin
found. Even so, later studies in the 1980s and 1990s have sug-
gested that there is little read ing comprehension instruction in
schools (e.g., Pressley & Wharton-McDonald, 1998). We need
to understand why many teachers do not focus directly on
comprehension strategies and routines, and we need to learn
more about how to help teachers provide good com prehension
instruction. A central question is, How can and should teachers
embed all these research-documented practices into a curricu-
lum? It is one thing to demonstrate that if a comprehension
strategy is taught systematically over, say, a 10-week period,
stu dents will benefit in terms of strategy acquisition text com-
prehen sion, or even standardized test achievement. It is quite
another to figure out how to “curricularize” that strategy, along
with all the other research-proven strategies that might present
themselves to a teacher or a district curriculum committee for
regular inclusion into the reading program. Although each of
the individual strategies and routines we have discussed repre-
sents an admirable addition to the comprehension curriculum,
none could serve as the sole activity stu dents encountered day
after day, selection after selection.
Thus, providing some variety both within and among selections
makes sense. We have little research, however, on optimal combi-
nations and distributions of various strategies over time. The clos-
est we come to any definitive research on this question is with
Transitional Strategies Instruction, which is portrayed by its devel-
opers more as a menu of ac tivities from which a teacher could
select than as a subset of strategies most appropriate for a partic-
ular story, book, or selection. In terms of research, it would be
useful to complement our knowledge of the effec tiveness of
strategies when they are taught in special units with knowl edge of
their value added to a comprehension curriculum. Without finding
better ways of bringing effective comprehension instruction to
classrooms, continued research refining particular comprehension
in struction techniques will provide little or no real value.
These difficult questions must be addressed by teachers,
teacher edu cators, and reading researchers. The stakes are too high
to leave them unanswered and unaddressed. In the meantime,
however, we can take some comfort in the knowledge that for the
teacher who wants to work directly with students to help them
develop a rich repertoire of effective comprehension strategies,
the tools are available. We know a great deal about how to help stu-
dents become more effective, more strategic, more self-reliant
readers. It is time that we put that knowledge to work.
SUMMARY
In this chapter, we have described effective individual and collective
strategies for teaching comprehension of text and discussed char-
acter istics of a balanced comprehension program into which such
strategies could be embedded. In Figure 10.6, we offer a tool for
assessing the com prehension instruction environment in your own
classroom. We hope that this will aid readers in identifying both
strengths and weaknesses in comprehension instruction as well as
serving as a summary of the ma terial presented in this chapter. We
hope it will not prove overwhelm ing, even to those who are novices
at comprehension instruction. Realize that the use of even one of
the techniques described in this chapter has been shown to improve
students’ comprehension of text. In fact, in the previous edition of
this book, Pearson suggested that comprehension in struction is best
when it focuses on a few well-taught, well-learned strategies.
Although we can now point to a litany of effective techniques, that
does not mean that using a litany of techniques will be effective.
118 JOURNAL OF EDUCATION • VOLUME 189 • NUMBERS 1/2 • 2008/2009

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About the overall reading program
• How much time do students spend actually reading?
• How much reading do students routinely do in texts other than those written solely for reading or content area instruction?
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• Are students’ comprehension skills assessed on an ongoing basis?
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Other Resources
The reference section includes references to many books, chapters, and
articles that address specific comprehension strategies and approaches to
teaching them. There are also references to several reviews of research.
For more comprehensive discussions of comprehension instruction writ-
ten specifically for teachers, you might consult any of the following
recently published books on the topic:
Blachowicz, C., & Ogle, D. (2001). Reading comprehension: Strategies for
independent learners. New York: Guilford. Block, C. C., & Pressley, M.
(Eds.) (2001). Comprehension instruction: Research-based best practices.
New York: Guilford.
Keene, E. O., & Zimmerman, S. (1997). Mosaic of thought: Teaching com-
prehension in a readers’ workshop. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.
NELL K. DUKE, Assistant Professor of Teacher Education, Michigan State Uni-
versity, East Lansing, Michigan, USA
P. DAVID PEARSON, Professor and Dean, University of California Berkeley,
Berkeley, CA, USA
122 JOURNAL OF EDUCATION • VOLUME 189 • NUMBERS 1/2 • 2008/2009