Comprehension, the ability to understand and gain meaning from language, is closely related to a student’s background knowledge. The National Research Council (NRC, 1998) asserted that a child needs both background knowledge and conceptual sophistication to understand the meaning of a text. Students extract meaning as well as construct meaning as they build representations and gain new meaning (Snow & Sweet, 2003). Comprehension abilities are the direct result of active reading in which readers think about their reading, making connections and inferences to understand text.

MULTIPLE STRATEGIES INSTRUCTION

The NRP found helping students learn specific cognitive strategies and guiding students to reason strategically when challenges occur can result in improved reading comprehension. The NRP concluded that teaching different reading comprehension strategies is effective and results in increased understanding and retention of texts, and that instruction on the flexible use of multiple strategies is effective in teaching comprehension (NICHHD, 2000).

Research about comprehension following the NRP report has confirmed the effectiveness of explicit teaching of multiple strategies. It is recommended students be taught to distinguish the elements of narrative and expository text and to apply specific comprehension strategies, including self-monitoring their own reading (metacognition), previewing the text and making predictions; organizing and retelling information presented; recognizing story structure; generating questions about the text; identifying main ideas and summarizing text passages; engaging in self questioning and visualization; and confirming or revising predictions (Carlisle & Rice, 2002; NICHHD, 2000; Pressley & Wharton-McDonald, 1997; Rosenshine, Meister, & Chapman, 1996). Teacher-directed, explicit reading comprehension instruction should include the use of modeling, thinking aloud, questioning, summarizing, and other techniques that promote active construction of meaning (Moats, 2005). In addition, increasing the amount of time spent in reading appropriate level texts with teacher supports or scaffolds results not only in improved word reading but in comprehension as well (Kuhn et al., 2006).

Excerpt from Successful Intervention Builds Student Success: Applying the Many Layers of Structured Literacy and Reading Research for Struggling K–5 Students by Voyager Sopris Learning.