ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses in detail why and how the comprehension problem solving (CPS) process and the unique characteristics of diverse texts should be taught explicitly. It provides strategies for integrating the CPS process into daily classroom life, and looks at how text characteristics and structures can affect comprehension. Traditional measures of intelligence are not highly correlated with basic reading sub-skills, such as word identification and letter– sound decoding but IQ scores do tend to distinguish between children who are skilled comprehenders and those who are less skilled. Comprehension relies heavily on thinking, especially coordinated and purposeful thinking orchestrated to solve the problem of how to make sense of texts— for example, the CPS process. Teaching this kind of thinking requires more than talking about it. This kind of instruction has been labeled "direct" or "explicit"; the term "explicit" is used in this text.
