ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the factors that impact comprehension of text and ways of improving comprehension, particularly when the text is challenging. It discusses three such strategies: generating questions, elaborating and explaining text, and completing graphic organizers. The chapter also discusses these strategies because they have been shown to be effective in improving students' understanding of challenging text across multiple age levels and multiple types of texts. Further, when students learn how to generate questions, they ask better questions and their text comprehension improves. Combining self-explanation with instruction to use effective comprehension strategies affords opportunities to practice using the comprehension strategies. The students' active integration of the text and the picture is a crucial component of comprehension because text/picture integration is sometimes quite challenging. Comprehension strategies are essential to learning from text. It's important to remember that students often do not understand the text that they read, and comprehension strategies can help them to construct coherent understandings.
