Social and Cultural Diversity as Lens for Understanding Student Learning and the Development of Reading Comprehension

This chapter offers a multi-dimensional framework for interrogating the development of reading comprehension that draws across findings from studies of human development, ecological systems, cognition, and culture to articulate a broad understanding of the demands of reading comprehension and implications for the design of robust learning environments. This chapter interrogates the limitations of existing assessments of comprehension, standards, and conceptions of text complexity in terms of diminishing how the field is able to understand problem solving repertoires from across diverse communities of practice that can support the development of reading comprehension skills, dispositions, and epistemologies. This chapter concludes with implications for practice and infrastructure.