ABSTRACT
How do we best teach our students to make sense of their reading? This question has been increasingly central to scholars and practitioners since the early 1980s. As a result, there is an extensive research base for making decisions about effective instruction for individual students, choices of frameworks to organize instruction within literacy and across school subjects, and processes for bringing coherence to school-wide comprehension instruction (Anderson, Hiebert, Scott, & Wilkinson, 1984; Tierney & Cunningham, 1984; Dole, Duffy, Roehler, & Pearson, 1991; Pearson & Fielding, 1991; Pressley, 2000, 2002; RAND Reading Study Group, 2002; Raphael, Highfi eld, & Au, 2006). In this chapter, we characterize the research base in terms of three waves that provide current bases for decisions about instructional approaches for improving diverse readers’ comprehension and critical analyses of the wide array of text today. These three waves are:
1980s-Individual Strategy Research: Research focused on identifying strategies used by good readers, methods for teaching those strategies, and evaluating the impact or effectiveness of the strategy instruction on various measures of comprehension. 1990s-Frameworks for Multiple Strategies: Extending studies of strategy instruction to consider authenticity of activity settings, teacher-student interactions as students develop control over strategies (including use of multiple strategies over time), and where reading is used for a variety of purposes (e.g., inquiry, engagement, literature discussion). Current decade-Bringing School-Wide Coherence to Comprehension Instruction: Building on the body of research on comprehension instruction to support high-level instruction across grade level and school subject areas to create a coherent literacy curriculum. We focus on how students diverse in linguistic, economic, social, and cultural backgrounds, who depend on school for learning, can receive high-level, rigorous and coherent, comprehension instruction in each school year.
