ABSTRACT
This volume is replete with knowledge claims about the processes of understanding and learning from text that, directly or indirectly, have implications for teaching. The focus of this chapter is on the design of a hypermedia environment intended to support the learning of teachers about a number of complex issues that attend reading comprehension instruction. Our goal in this chapter is to describe the design decisions and how they were informed by the knowledge base regarding two things: (a) text comprehension and effective comprehension instruction and (b) learning from hypermedia systems. What motivates our interest in presenting this information is an awareness that there is a scholarship behind the design of learning environments that is seldom transparent and often unacknowledged. Before describing this hypermedia environment, we characterize the problems of upper elementary students that are core to our work, and we then describe the problems of teaching reading comprehension.
