Reed Deborah K. - Improving Reading Comprehension of Middle and High School Students

Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015

Marcia A. Barnes 1

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Abstract

Cognitive models of reading comprehension provide a starting point for asking theoretically-motivated and empirically-driven questions relevant to understanding the reading comprehension of adolescent students. This chapter provides an introduction to the volume by reviewing component skills approaches and process models of reading comprehension followed by a discussion of selected empirical work related to these models. Developmental and individual differences in key comprehension-related processes from these models are discussed with particular reference to adolescent readers. Characteristics of discipline-specific texts that affect comprehension in middle school and high school students are also examined. Implications of this research for informing reading comprehension assessment, instruction, and interventions through the adolescent years are provided, with reference to the other chapters in this volume.

Keywords

Models of academic skills are important for organizing what is known about skill development and performance as well as for guiding research on instruction, intervention, and assessment. This chapter presents an overview of cognitive models of reading comprehension and empirical work on the typical and atypical development of reading comprehension to provide a lens through which comprehension in adolescent students can be viewed. Because of considerable gaps in our knowledge of the development of comprehension skillsparticularly in older students and for the types of texts that these students must read, understand, and use to learnI pose a series of comments and questions in the chapter that might be fruitful to pursue in order to inform research in the domain of adolescents reading comprehension.

Reading comprehension is the product of processes that operate during reading to create a mental representation of the situation described by the text, referred to as a situation model (Kintsch, ). The resulting mental representation includes information provided by the propositional content of the text that is integrated with the readers knowledge to provide an evolving understanding of what is read. There are several approaches to understanding and modeling reading comprehension, including those that focus more on describing component skills that contribute to text comprehension and those that describe the process of comprehension or how comprehension of text unfolds over time to result in the construction of the situation model. These approaches represent different levels of explanation and investigation. The aim of this chapter is not to compare these various approaches, but to use them as a starting point for asking theoretically-motivated and empirically-driven questions relevant to understanding the reading comprehension of adolescent students. Component skills approaches and process models of reading comprehension are reviewed briefly followed by a discussion of selected empirical work related to these models. Potential implications of this literature for understanding reading comprehension through the adolescent years are provided, with reference to the other chapters in this volume.