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Effective Practices for Developing Reading

Comprehension

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from What Research Has to Say About Reading Instruction, Third Edition - © 2002, International Reading Association

Chapter 10

Effective Practices for Developing

Reading Comprehension
Nell K. Duke and P. David Pearson

eading comprehension research has a long and rich history. There

R is much that we can say about both the nature of reading compre-
hension as a process and about effective reading comprehension in-
struction. Most of what we know has been learned since 1975. Why have
we been able to make so much progress so fast? We believe that part of
the reason behind this steep learning curve has been the lack of contro-
versy about teaching comprehension. Unlike decoding, oral reading, and
reading readiness, those who study reading comprehension instruction
have avoided much of the acrimony characteristic of work in other as-
pects of reading.
As it should be, much work on the process of reading comprehension
has been grounded in studies of good readers. We know a great deal
about what good readers do when they read:
• Good readers are active readers.
• From the outset they have clear goals in mind for their reading.
They constantly evaluate whether the text, and their reading of it,
is meeting their goals.
• Good readers typically look over the text before they read, noting
such things as the structure of the text and text sections that might
be most relevant to their reading goals.
• As they read, good readers frequently make predictions about what
is to come.
• They read selectively, continually making decisions about their reading—
what to read carefully, what to read quickly, what not to read, what
to reread, and so on.
• Good readers construct, revise, and question the meanings they make
as they read.

205
 • Good readers try to determine the meaning of unfamiliar words and
concepts in the text, and they deal with inconsistencies or gaps as
needed.
• They draw from, compare, and integrate their prior knowledge with
material in the text.
• They think about the authors of the text, their style, beliefs, inten-
tions, historical milieu, and so on.
• They monitor their understanding of the text, making adjustments in
their reading as necessary.
• They evaluate the text’s quality and value, and react to the text in a
range of ways, both intellectually and emotionally.
• Good readers read different kinds of text differently.
• When reading narrative, good readers attend closely to the setting
and characters.
• When reading expository text, these readers frequently construct
and revise summaries of what they have read.
• For good readers, text processing occurs not only during “reading”
as we have traditionally defined it, but also during short breaks
taken during reading, even after the “reading” itself has com-
menced, even after the “reading” has ceased.
• Comprehension is a consuming, continuous, and complex activity,
but one that, for good readers, is both satisfying and productive.

(See Pressley and Afflerbach [1995] and Block and Pressley [2001] for re-
views of much of the research on good readers’ comprehension. The in-
tellectual ancestor to this chapter is “Developing Expertise in Reading
Comprehension” [Pearson, Roehler, Dole, & Duffy, 1992] in the second
edition of What Research Has to Say About Reading Instruction; this piece
also provides a good overview of the work upon which this characteri-
zation of good reading is based.)
Given knowledge about what good readers do when they read, re-
searchers and educators have addressed the following question: Can we
teach students to engage in these productive behaviors? The answer is a
resounding yes. A large volume of work indicates that we can help stu-
dents acquire the strategies and processes used by good readers—and
that this improves their overall comprehension of text, both the texts
used to teach the strategies and texts they read on their own in the future.

206 Duke and Pearson

In this chapter, we will describe some proven instructional techniques
for helping students acquire productive comprehension skills and strate-
gies. As you will see, there is a large if not overwhelming number and
range of techniques that work, yet the use of even one technique alone
has been shown to improve students’ comprehension. Teaching what
we call collections or packages of comprehension strategies can help stu-
dents become truly solid comprehenders of many kinds of text.

Balanced Comprehension Instruction

To borrow a term from the decoding debate, comprehension instruction
should be balanced. By this we mean that good comprehension instruc-
tion includes both explicit instruction in specific comprehension strate-
gies and a great deal of time and opportunity for actual reading, writing,
and discussion of text. The components in our approach to balanced
comprehension instruction are a supportive classroom context and a
model of comprehension instruction.

A Supportive Classroom Context

It is not enough just to offer good instruction. Several important features
of good reading instruction also need to be present. Otherwise, the com-
prehension instruction will not take hold and flourish. These features in-
clude the following:
• A great deal of time spent actually reading. As with decoding, all the
explicit instruction in the world will not make students strong read-
ers unless it is accompanied by lots of experience applying their
knowledge, skills, and strategies during actual reading.
• Experience reading real texts for real reasons. To become strong, flex-
ible, and devoted comprehenders of text, students need experience
reading texts beyond those designed solely for reading instruction,
as well as experience reading text with a clear and compelling pur-
pose in mind.
• Experience reading the range of text genres that we wish students to
comprehend. Students will not learn to become excellent compre-
henders of any given type of text without substantial experience
reading and writing it. For example, experience reading storybooks
will not, by itself, enable a student to read, understand, and cri-
tique procedural forms of text of the sort found in how-to books,
instruction manuals, and the like.

Effective Practices for Developing Reading Comprehension 207

 • An environment rich in vocabulary and concept development through
reading, experience, and, above all, discussion of words and their
meanings. Any text comprehension depends on some relevant prior
knowledge. To some degree, well-chosen texts can, in themselves,
build readers’ knowledge base. At the same time, hands-on activi-
ties, excursions, conversations, and other experiences are also
needed to develop vocabulary and concept knowledge required to
understand a given text.
• Substantial facility in the accurate and automatic decoding of words.
In a recent review of the literature, Pressley (2000) argues com-
pellingly that skilled decoding is necessary, although by no means
sufficient, for skilled comprehension.
• Lots of time spent writing texts for others to comprehend. Again, stu-
dents should experience writing the range of genres we wish them
to be able to comprehend. Their instruction should emphasize con-
nections between reading and writing, developing students’ abilities
to write like a reader and read like a writer.
• An environment rich in high-quality talk about text. This should in-
volve both teacher-to-student and student-to-student talk. It should
include discussions of text processing at a number of levels, from
clarifying basic material stated in the text to drawing interpretations
of text material to relating the text to other texts, experiences, and
reading goals.

A Model of Comprehension Instruction

The model of comprehension instruction we believe is best supported by
research does more than simply include instruction in specific compre-
hension strategies and opportunities to read, write, and discuss texts—
it connects and integrates these different learning opportunities.
Specifically, we suggest an instructional model including the following
five components:
1. An explicit description of the strategy and when and how it should
be used. “Predicting is making guesses about what will come next in
the text you are reading. You should make predictions a lot when
you read. For now, you should stop every two pages that you read
and make some predictions.”
2. Teacher and/or student modeling of the strategy in action.“I am going
to make predictions while I read this book. I will start with just the

208 Duke and Pearson

 cover here. Hmm...I see a picture of an owl. It looks like he—I think
it is a he—is wearing pajamas, and he is carrying a candle. I predict
that this is going to be a make-believe story because owls do not
really wear pajamas and carry candles. I predict it is going to be
about this owl, and it is going to take place at nighttime.
“The title will give me more clues about the book; the title is
Owl at Home. So this makes me think even more that this book is
going to be about the owl. He will probably be the main character.
And it will take place in his house.
“Okay, I have made some predictions about the book based on
the cover. Now I am going to open up the book and begin reading.”
3. Collaborative use of the strategy in action. “I have made some good
predictions so far in the book. From this part on I want you to
make predictions with me. Each of us should stop and think about
what might happen next.... Okay, now let’s hear what you think
and why....”
4. Guided practice using the strategy with gradual release of responsibility.
Early on...
“I have called the three of you together to work on making pre-
dictions while you read this and other books. After every few pages
I will ask each of you to stop and make a prediction. We will talk
about your predictions and then read on to see if they come true.”
Later on...
“Each of you has a chart that lists different pages in your book.
When you finish reading a page on the list, stop and make a pre-
diction. Write the prediction in the column that says ‘Prediction.’
When you get to the next page on the list, check off whether your
prediction ‘Happened,’ ‘Will not happen,’ or ‘Still might happen.’
Then make another prediction and write it down.” (This is based
on the Reading Forecaster Technique from Mason and Au [1986]
described and cited in Lipson and Wixson [1991].)
5. Independent use of the strategy. “It is time for silent reading. As you
read today, remember what we have been working on—making
predictions while we read. Be sure to make predictions every two
or three pages. Ask yourself why you made the prediction you
did—what made you think that. Check as you read to see whether

Effective Practices for Developing Reading Comprehension 209

 your prediction came true. Jamal is passing out Predictions! book-
marks to remind you.”

Throughout these five phases, it is important that neither the teacher

nor the students lose sight of the need to coordinate or orchestrate com-
prehension strategies. Strategies are not to be used singly—good readers
do not read a book and only make predictions. Rather, good readers use
multiple strategies constantly. Although the above model foregrounds a
particular strategy at a particular time, other strategies should also be ref-
erenced, modeled, and encouraged throughout the process. A way of con-
ceptualizing the orchestration process is captured in a classic visual model
from Pearson and Gallagher’s (1983) early work on comprehension in-
struction. In that model (see Figure 10.1), teachers move from a situa-
tion in which they assume all the responsibility for performing a task

Figure 10.1. Gradual release of responsibility

100
Primarily Teacher
Percent of Task Responsibility Assumed by the Teacher

Modeling*

Guided Practice
Direct
Instruction*

Region of Shared Responsibility

Participating*
Scaffolding*

Facilitating*

Primarily
Student
0
0 Percent of Task Responsibility Assumed by the Student 100

As one moves down the diagonal from upper left to lower right, students assume more, and
teachers less, responsibility for task completion. There are three regions of responsibility:
primarily teacher in the upper left corner, primarily student in the lower right, and shared
responsibility in the center. (This figure is adapted with permission from Pearson and Gallagher
[1983]; the asterisked terms are borrowed from Au & Raphael [1998].)

210 Duke and Pearson

while the student assumes none, which we would call modeling or
demonstrating a strategy (the upper left corner), to a situation in which
the students assume all the responsibility while the teacher assumes none,
which we would call independent strategy use (lower right corner), a sit-
uation in which teachers can shift to a participation mode, performing
tasks in much the same way as any other group member. Instruction in
the upper left corner would be labeled teacher centered, whereas instruc-
tion in the lower right would be student centered.

Other Teaching Considerations

Choosing well-suited texts. Another important role for the teacher in
implementing this model is in choosing the texts to use. At least some of
the texts used during these different phases of comprehension instruction
should be chosen to be particularly well suited to application of the spe-
cific strategy being learned. Just as many have recommended using texts
in decoding instruction that emphasizes the particular sound-letter rela-
tionships students are learning, we recommend linking closely the com-
prehension strategy being taught to the texts to which it is initially applied
and practiced. For example, a good text for learning about the predic-
tion strategy would be one that students have not read before (hence, they
would not already know what happens next), that has a sequence of
events, and that provides sufficient clues about upcoming events for the
reader to make informed predictions about them. Also, as is recom-
mended for decoding instruction, we recommend careful attention to the
level and demands of texts used in different phases of instruction, espe-
cially the early phases. When students are first learning a comprehension
strategy, they should encounter texts that do not make heavy demands
in other respects, such as background knowledge, vocabulary load, or
decoding. Later, of course, students must be asked to apply the strategy to
the range of texts they will meet during everyday reading—in reading/
language arts, in content area classes (i.e., social studies, science, and
mathematics), and on their own.

Concern with student motivation. The level of motivation students bring

to a task impacts whether and how they will use comprehension strate-
gies (Dole, Brown, & Trathen, 1996; Guthrie et al., 1996). Therefore, the
model we suggest, in particular the independent practice portion, should
be made as motivating to students as possible. Accompaniments to com-
prehension instruction we have already noted—such as providing

Effective Practices for Developing Reading Comprehension 211

 experience reading real texts for real reasons and creating an environ-
ment rich in high-quality talk about text—will undoubtedly help. Other
strategies can be found in books, articles, and chapters devoted specifi-
cally to the topic of motivation and engagement (e.g., Guthrie &
Wigfield, 1997).

Ongoing assessment. Finally, as with any good instruction, compre-

hension instruction should be accompanied by ongoing assessment.
Teachers should monitor students’ use of comprehension strategies and
their success at understanding what they read. Results of this monitoring
should, in turn, inform the teacher’s instruction. When a particular
strategy continues to be used ineffectively, or not at all, the teacher
should respond with additional instruction or a modified instructional
approach. At the same time, students should be monitoring their own
use of comprehension strategies, aware of their strengths as well as their
weaknesses as developing comprehenders.

Building a Comprehension Curriculum

With this overall model for comprehension instruction as a background
to be used in teaching any useful strategy, we now turn to specific com-
prehension strategies that research has shown to be effective in improv-
ing students’ comprehension of text. These are the strategies we
recommend explaining and modeling for students and then emphasiz-
ing in shared, guided, and independent reading. The effectiveness of
these strategies is not limited to a particular age group. Age groups used
in studies consulted for this review range from kindergarten through
college level. Certainly not every strategy presented has been tested for
this entire range of age groups, but neither is there substantial evidence
to indicate that any strategy is inappropriate for any age range. First, we
introduce six important strategies, and then we review some “routines”
that actually integrate several strategies in a single activity.

Effective Individual Comprehension Strategies

Prediction. We have labeled the first strategy prediction, although it is
better conceived as a family of strategies than a single, identifiable strat-
egy. At its core is making predictions and then reading to see how they
turned out, but it also entails activities that come with different labels,
such as activating prior knowledge, previewing, and overviewing. What

212 Duke and Pearson

all these variants have in common is encouraging students to use their
existing knowledge to facilitate their understanding of new ideas en-
countered in text. Although these strategies have some earlier roots (e.g.,
Ausabel, 1968; Stauffer, 1976, 1980), these activities are most clearly the
legacy of the 1980s, with its emphasis on schema theory (Anderson &
Pearson, 1984) and comprehension as the bridge between the known
and the new (Pearson & Johnson, 1978).
Although it might seem reasonable to expect research on prediction
and prior knowledge activation to be equally distributed across narrative
and expository text genres, it is decidedly biased toward narrative texts
(see Pearson & Fielding, 1991). Two activities dominate the work: mak-
ing predictions and activating prior knowledge about story theme, con-
tent, or structure. Hansen’s work (Hansen, 1981; Hansen & Pearson,
1983) provides rich examples of prior knowledge activation. In both
instances, students were encouraged to generate expectations about what
characters might do based on their own experiences in similar situations.
This technique led to superior comprehension of the stories in which the
activity was embedded and to superior performance for younger and less
able older readers on new stories that the students read without any
teacher support. Working with fourth-grade students, Neuman (1988)
found that when teachers presented students with oral previews of sto-
ries, which were then turned into discussions and predictions, story
comprehension increased relative to “read only” previews and typical
basal background-building lessons. In a creative variation of the preview
theme, McGinley and Denner (1987) had students compose very short
narratives based on a list of keywords from the upcoming story. For ex-
ample, terms such as loose tooth, string, pain, baseball game, tie score,
and home run might serve as keywords for an upcoming story about a
girl who has a loose tooth that will not come out but falls out naturally
when she is engrossed in a close ballgame. Interestingly, the accuracy of
their “prediction” stories proved relatively unimportant in explaining
subsequent comprehension of the real stories; apparently, it was the en-
gagement itself that triggered the deeper story comprehension.
Explicit attempts to get students to engage in prediction behaviors
have proved successful in increasing interest in and memory for stories
(Anderson, Wilkinson, Mason, & Shirey, 1987). Fielding, Anderson, and
Pearson (1990) found that prediction activities promoted overall story
understanding only if the predictions were explicitly compared to text
ideas during further reading, suggesting that the verification process, in

Effective Practices for Developing Reading Comprehension 213

 which knowledge and text are compared explicitly, may be as important
as making the prediction.
These studies suggest a variety of productive ways of encouraging
students to engage their knowledge and experience prior to reading.
They also suggest that in nearly all cases, the impact on story under-
standing is positive, at least for narrative texts in which themes and top-
ics are likely to be highly familiar. The situation may be quite different
in reading expository texts, especially if students’ existing knowledge is
riddled with misconceptions about matters of science and prejudices in
the realm of human experience (see, for example, Guzzetti, Snyder,
Glass, & Gamas, 1993).

Think-aloud. Another proven instructional technique for improving

comprehension is think-aloud. As its name implies, think-aloud involves
making one’s thoughts audible and, usually, public—saying what you are
thinking while you are performing a task, in this case, reading. Think-
aloud has been shown to improve students’ comprehension both when
students themselves engage in the practice during reading and also when
teachers routinely think aloud while reading to students.
Teacher think-aloud. Teacher think-aloud is typically conceived of as
a form of teacher modeling. By thinking aloud, teachers demonstrate
effective comprehension strategies and, at least as importantly, when and
when not to apply them. For example, in the following teacher think-
aloud, the teacher demonstrates the use of visualization and prediction
strategies:

That night Max wore his wolf suit and made mischief of one kind and
another.... Boy, I can really visualize Max. He’s in this monster suit and
he is chasing after his dog with a fork in his hand. I think he is really
starting to act crazy. I wonder what made Max act like that...Hm-m-
m...I bet he was getting a little bored and wanted to go on an adven-
ture. I think that is my prediction. (Pressley et al., 1992, p. 518)

Studies typically have not examined the effect of teacher think-aloud

by itself, but rather as part of a package of reading comprehension strate-
gies. Therefore, although we cannot infer directly that teacher think-
aloud is effective, it is clear that as part of a package, teacher think-aloud
has been proven effective in a number of studies. For example, teacher
think-aloud is part of the Informed Strategies for Learning (ISL) program
(Paris, Cross, & Lipson, 1984), the reciprocal teaching approach (see later

214 Duke and Pearson

discussion), and the SAIL program (see later discussion), all of which
have been shown to be effective at improving student comprehension. It
is also an important part of the early modeling stages of instruction in
many comprehension training routines, for example, the QAR work of
Raphael and her colleagues (Raphael, Wonnacott, & Pearson, 1983) and
the inference training work of Gordon and Pearson (1983). These stud-
ies suggest that teacher modeling is most effective when it is explicit, leav-
ing the student to intuit or infer little about the strategy and its
application, and flexible, adjusting strategy use to the text rather than pre-
senting it as governed by rigid rules. Teacher think-aloud with these at-
tributes is most likely to improve students’ comprehension of text.
Student think-aloud. Instruction that entails students thinking aloud
themselves also has proven effective at improving comprehension (see
Kucan & Beck, 1997, for a review). A classic study by Bereiter and Bird
(1985) showed that students who were asked to think aloud while read-
ing had better comprehension than students who were not taught to
think aloud, according to a question-and-answer comprehension test.
A compelling study by Silven and Vauras (1992) demonstrated that stu-
dents who were prompted to think aloud as part of their comprehension
training were better at summarizing information in a text than students
whose training did not include think-aloud.
Several scholars have theorized about why student think-aloud is ef-
fective at improving comprehension. One popular theory is that getting
students to think aloud decreases their impulsiveness (Meichebaum &
Asnarow, 1979). Rather than jumping to conclusions about text meaning
or moving ahead in the text without having sufficiently understood what
had already been read, think-aloud may lead to more thoughtful, strate-
gic reading. A study conducted with third-grade students provides some
empirical support for this theory. Baumann and his colleagues found
that training in think-aloud improved children’s ability to monitor their
comprehension while reading (Baumann, Seifert-Kessel, & Jones, 1992).
Third-grade children trained to think aloud as they used several com-
prehension strategies were better than a comparison group at detecting
errors in passages, responding to a questionnaire about comprehension
monitoring, and completing cloze items. One student trained in think-
aloud explained, “When I read I think, is this making sense? I might...ask
questions about the story and reread or retell the story” (Baumann et al.,
p. 159). This and other student comments suggested a thoughtful, strate-
gic approach to reading through think-aloud.

Effective Practices for Developing Reading Comprehension 215

 Text structure. Beginning in the late 1970s and extending throughout
the 1980s into the early 1990s, we witnessed an explosion of research
about the efficacy of teaching children to use the structure of texts, both
narrative and expository, to organize their understanding and recall of
important ideas. Most of the research emphasized the structural aspects
of text organization rather than the substance of the ideas, the logic be-
ing that it was structure, not content, that would transfer to new texts
that students would meet on their own.
Story structure. The research on story structure uses a few consistent
heuristics to help students organize their story understanding and recall.
Usually, these are organized into a story grammar (see Mandler, 1978;
Stein & Glenn, 1979), or as it is commonly called in instructional parl-
ance, a story map (see Pearson, 1981), which includes categories such as
setting, problem, goal, action, outcome, resolution, and theme.
Instruction typically consists of modeling, guided practice, and inde-
pendent practice in recognizing parts of the stories under discussion that
instantiate, or “fill,” each category. Although there are situations, texts,
and populations in which this sort of instruction does not appear help-
ful, in the main, story structure instruction shows positive effects for a
wide range of students, from kindergarten (Morrow, 1984a, 1984b) to
the intermediate grades (Gordon & Pearson, 1983; Nolte & Singer, 1985)
to high school (Singer & Donlan, 1982) to special populations (Idol,
1987), and to students identified as struggling readers (Fitzgerald &
Spiegel, 1983). Regarding transfer, although the effects are complex and
sometimes subtle, it appears the effects are most stable for the texts in
which the instruction has been embedded (Singer & Donlan, 1982),
and they do transfer to new, independently read texts (Gordon &
Pearson, 1983; Greenewald & Rossing, 1986).
Informational text structure. Most of the research establishing the pos-
itive impact of helping students learn to use the structural features of in-
formational texts as aides to understanding and recall has been conducted
since the appearance of elaborate text analysis schemes in the late 1970s
(e.g., Kintsch & Van Dijk, 1978; Meyer, 1975; see also Meyer & Rice, 1984,
for a complete review of this early work). The early work documented the
significance of attention to text structure, pointing out that students—for
whatever reasons, including the fact that they are simply better readers—
who are more knowledgeable about text structure recall more textual
information than those who are less knowledgeable (Bartlett, 1978;
Meyer, Brandt, & Bluth, 1980). The work also suggested that knowledge is

216 Duke and Pearson

not enough. Students must actually follow the text’s structure in build-
ing their recall for the effect to be realized; not surprisingly, more good
than poor readers are inclined to do so (Bartlett, 1978; Taylor, 1980).
The approaches to teaching text structure have exhibited substantial
variability, beginning with general attempts to sensitize students to
structural elements (e.g., Bartlett, 1978; Davis, Lange, & Samuels, 1988;
Slater, Graves, & Piche, 1985) and extending to hierarchical summaries
of key ideas (e.g., Taylor & Beach, 1984) and to visual representations of
key ideas, such as conceptual maps, semantic networks, charts, and
graphs (e.g., Armbruster & Anderson, 1980; Armbruster, Anderson, &
Ostertag, 1987; Gallagher & Pearson, 1989; Geva, 1983; Holley &
Dansereau, 1984). In general, the research suggests that almost any ap-
proach to teaching the structure of informational text improves both
comprehension and recall of key text information. One plausible expla-
nation is that systematic attention to the underlying organization,
whether intended by the authors of texts or not, helps students relate
ideas to one another in ways that make them more understandable and
more memorable. Another plausible explanation is that it is actually
knowledge of the content, not facility with text structure, that children
acquire when they attend to the structural features of text. In other
words, text structure is nothing more than an alias for the underlying
structure of knowledge in that domain.
Only a few of the studies in this area have evaluated these competing
hypotheses. The results of the Gallagher and Pearson (1989) work suggest
that both content and structural features contribute to the salutary effects
of “text structure” instruction. Over a series of several weeks, Gallagher
and Pearson taught fourth-grade students, mainly poor readers, to apply
a consistent structural framework, instantiated as a set of matrix charts
and flowcharts, to their reading and discussion of short books about dif-
ferent social insects (ants, bees, and termites). The outcome measures
included several independently read passages, each passage successively
more distant from the original social insect books. They read, in order, a
passage about a fourth social insect, the paper wasp, a passage about a hu-
man society, and a passage about geographic formations such as gulfs,
capes, peninsulas, and the like. As the conceptual distance between the
original set of books and the testing passages increased, the effect of the
intervention (compared with a group who read the same texts and
answered questions and with a group that only read the texts) decreased in
magnitude, but was still statistically significant, suggesting that students

Effective Practices for Developing Reading Comprehension 217

 were learning something about (a) insect societies, (b) social organiza-
tion in general, and (c) how to unearth the structure of an informational
text. From a classroom teacher’s perspective, there is some comfort in
knowing that content knowledge and text structure are naturally inter-
twined; after all, either or both represent legitimate curricular goals.

Visual representations of text. There is an old saying that a picture is

worth a thousand words. When it comes to comprehension, this saying
might be paraphrased, “a visual display helps readers understand, or-
ganize, and remember some of those thousand words.” Compare the
short text on digestion to the flow chart in Figure 10.2. The text is verbal,
abstract, and eminently forgettable; by contrast, the flowchart is visual,
concrete, and arguably more memorable.

Figure 10.2. Text versus visual representation

Text describing the digestive process:

When you eat, you use your teeth to break food apart into tiny particles. These pieces
mix with saliva to become a kind of mush. When you swallow, the food goes through a
tube into your stomach, where it is digested. During digestion, your body breaks down
the food into smaller and smaller bits. The food contains things your body needs,
which we call nutrients. As the food passes from the stomach into the intestine, the
nutrients pass through the walls of intestine into your bloodstream. Your bloodstream
carries these nutrients to all parts of your body. The part of the food that is not
digested, which we call waste, passes out of the body through the intestine.
Flowchart of the digestive process:

Food Teeth
break Swallow and
enters
mouth
. food into . food travels
through tube
small bits
into stomach

Nutrients pass through

intestine wall into
bloodstream and then Food is broken
to the entire body down even
more in the
stomach, creating
nutrients and
waste
Waste passes out of
body through intestine

218 Duke and Pearson

 That said, we readily admit that when it comes to the use of visual
representations of text, it is difficult, perhaps impossible, to specify ex-
actly what it is that students attend to and learn when teachers use them
as heuristic devices to aid in comprehension and recall. The ubiquitous
use of semantic maps and webs reveals this ambiguity. Consider, for ex-
ample, the web in Figure 10.3.
This could be a graphic summary of an article about coyotes. Or, it
could be a map of an individual’s (or a whole class’s collective) knowledge
about coyotes. Or, it could be a heuristic device used by a teacher to teach
key vocabulary in a unit on scavenging animals. In a practical sense, as we
pointed out in discussing text structure instruction, it does not really
matter. To the contrary, we would expect tools and activities that improve
comprehension to also enhance knowledge of text structure and vocab-
ulary acquisition. The point about visual representations is that they are
re-presentations; literally, they allow us to present information again. It
is through that active, transformative process that knowledge, compre-
hension, and memory form a synergistic relationship—whatever im-
proves one of these elements also improves the others.
Much of the research cited in the previous section on text structure
applies to the use of visual displays. Most notable, because of their

Figure 10.3. A semantic map of the concept, coyotes

Rodents g
ests
Food For
Garbage g
The Trickster
Habitats Deserts
Cities
Famous
Coyotes
lves
Wo
Coyotes Relatives Dogs
Hyenas

Humans Ways to
Harm Humans
Natural
Enemies
Ways to
Help Humans

Effective Practices for Developing Reading Comprehension 219

 consistent use of visual displays over an extended time period, is the
work of Armbruster, Anderson, and Ostertag (1987) and Gallagher and
Pearson (1989). Armbruster and colleagues (1987) employed the heuris-
tic of a general frame to assist students in learning from expository text.
For example, in history, a conflict frame is useful in organizing many his-
torical phenomena: One side wants X, the other wants Y, their desires
collide in some sort of conflict (war, debate, political battle), and some
sort of resolution, often tentative, is reached. In their approach to teach-
ing frames, Armbruster and her colleagues (Armbruster et al., 1987;
Armbruster, Anderson, & Meyer, 1990) have identified and successfully
taught students, usually at the middle school level, to use several generic
frames as tools for organizing what they are learning from their read-
ing, among them frames for depicting conflicts, cause-effect relations,
descriptions, explanations, and procedures. The effects in this work are
usually quite dramatic in improving understanding and recall for the
texts in which the instruction is embedded; transfer effects to new pas-
sages read without assistance or without the requirement that the frames
be used is much less impressive.
An exception to the transfer effect finding is the work of Gallagher
and Pearson (1989), described earlier in conjunction with text structure
instruction. Recall that although transfer decreased as a function of con-
ceptual distance from the original information domain (insect societies),
it was nonetheless significant even for passages on unrelated topics.
What may be central in this sort of instruction, besides consistent and
persistent guidance in how and why to use the visual displays, is direct
involvement in constructing the visual display along with compelling
feedback to the students in the form of evidence that the arduous effort
involved in re-presenting information pays off in terms of learning and,
in the case of older students, better grades.

Summarization. Teaching students to summarize what they read is an-

other way to improve their overall comprehension of text. Dole, Duffy,
Roehler, and Pearson (1991) describe summarizing as follows:

Often confused with determining importance, summarizing is a

broader, more synthetic activity for which determining importance is a
necessary, but not sufficient, condition. The ability to summarize in-
formation requires readers to sift through large units of text, differenti-
ate important from unimportant ideas, and then synthesize those ideas
and create a new coherent text that stands for, by substantive criteria,

220 Duke and Pearson

 the original. This sounds difficult, and the research demonstrates that,
in fact, it is. (p. 244)

Indeed, most people with relevant experience will agree that summariz-
ing is a difficult task for many children. Many children require instruc-
tion and practice in summarizing before they are able to produce good
oral and written summaries of text. Interestingly, research suggests that
instruction and practice in summarizing not only improves students’
ability to summarize text, but also their overall comprehension of text
content. Thus, instruction in summarization can be considered to meet
dual purposes: to improve students’ ability to summarize text and to im-
prove their ability to comprehend text and recall.
There are at least two major approaches to the teaching of summa-
rization. In rule-governed approaches, students are taught to follow a set
of step-by-step procedures to develop summaries. For example, McNeil
and Donant (1982) teach the following rules, which draw from the work
of Brown, Campione, and Day (1981) and Kintsch and Van Dijk (1978):
Rule 1: Delete unnecessary material.
Rule 2: Delete redundant material.
Rule 3: Compose a word to replace a list of items.
Rule 4: Compose a word to replace individual parts of an action.
Rule 5: Select a topic sentence.
Rule 6: Invent a topic sentence if one is not available.

Through teacher modeling, group practice, and individual practice, stu-

dents learn to apply these rules to create brief summaries of text.
Other approaches to summarizing text are more holistic. One that
has been the subject of research is the GIST procedure (Cunningham,
1982). In GIST, students create summaries of 15 or fewer words for in-
creasingly large amounts of text, beginning with single sentences and
working incrementally to an entire paragraph. As Cunningham de-
scribes it, GIST is conducted first as a whole class, then in small groups,
and finally on an individual basis.
Working with sixth-grade students, Bean and Steenwyk (1984) stud-
ied the effectiveness of McNeil and Donant’s set of rules procedure and
Cunningham’s GIST procedure. They found that versions of both ap-
proaches were effective not only in improving students’ written sum-
maries of text, but also in improving their comprehension of text as

Effective Practices for Developing Reading Comprehension 221

 measured by a standardized test. Despite being markedly different, the
two approaches were roughly equal in their effectiveness, and both were
superior to a control technique that involved only practice in writing
summaries based on the main ideas in text.
Perhaps one of the reasons why both McNeil and Donant’s and
Cunningham’s summary procedures are effective is that they are both
consistent with an overall model of text processing that itself has stood
the test of validation: Kintsch and Van Dijk’s (1978) model of text com-
prehension posits that text is understood through a series of identifiable
mental operations. These operations are necessary for understanding
both the local and the more global meaning of text within the constraints
of working memory, the reader’s goals, and the structure of the text.
Although a thorough description of these operations is beyond the scope
of this chapter, they essentially involve a series of deletions, inferences,
and generalizations, much like those required by the summarizing proce-
dures later used by McNeil and Donant.

Questions/questioning. No comprehension activity has a longer or more

pervasive tradition than asking students questions about their reading,
whether this occurs before, during, or after the reading (see Durkin,
1978, for compelling evidence of the ubiquity of this practice). We also
know much about the effect of asking different types of questions on
students’ understanding and recall of text, with the overall finding that
students’ understanding and recall can be readily shaped by the types of
questions to which they become accustomed (the classic review is
Anderson & Biddle, 1975, but see also Levin & Pressley, 1981; Pressey,
1926; Rickards, 1976). Thus, if students receive a steady diet of factual
detail questions, they tend, in future encounters with text, to focus their
efforts on factual details. If teachers desire recall of details, this is a clear
pathway to shaping that behavior. If, by contrast, more general or more
inferential understanding is desired, teachers should emphasize ques-
tions that provide that focus. When students often experience questions
that require them to connect information in the text to their knowledge
base, they will tend to focus on this more integrative behavior in the fu-
ture (e.g., Hansen, 1981).
Although the impact of questions on comprehension is important,
for our purposes, the more interesting questions are (a) whether students
can learn to generate their own questions about text and (b) what impact
this more generative behavior might have on subsequent comprehen-
sion. The research on engaging students in the process of generating

222 Duke and Pearson

questions about the texts they read, although not definitive, is generally
positive and encouraging (see Rosenshine, Meister, & Chapman, 1996,
for a review). Raphael and her colleagues (Raphael & McKinney, 1983;
Raphael & Pearson, 1985; Raphael & Wonnacott, 1985) carried out
perhaps the most elaborate line of work on question generation in
the mid-1980s. Using a technique called QARs (Question-Answer-
Relationships), Raphael and her colleagues modeled and engaged stu-
dents in the process of differentiating the types of questions they could
ask of text. Students learned to distinguish among three types of ques-
tions: (1) Right There QARs were those in which the question and the an-
swer were explicitly stated in the text, (2) Think and Search QARs had
questions and answers in the text, but some searching and inferential text
connections were required to make the link, and (3) On My Own QARs
were those in which the question was motivated by some text element
or item of information, but the answer had to be generated from the stu-
dents’ prior knowledge. Through a model of giving students ever-
increasing responsibility for the question generation, Raphael and her
colleagues were able to help students develop a sense of efficacy and con-
fidence in their ability to differentiate strategies in both responding to
and generating their own questions for text.
Later research by Yopp (1988) indicated that when students learn to
generate questions for text, their overall comprehension improves. In a
variation that wedded the logic of QARs with the work on story schemas
(e.g., Singer & Donlan, 1982), Yopp studied three different groups that
varied in terms of who was taking the responsibility for question gener-
ation. In the first group, the teacher asked the questions; in the second,
the students generated their own; in the third, the students generated
their own and were provided with a metacognitive routine (in the man-
ner of QAR) for answering their own questions. The second and third
groups performed better on posttests given during instruction and af-
ter the instruction had ended, suggesting that student control of the
questioning process is a desirable instructional goal. Furthermore, al-
though it did not translate into higher performance on the comprehen-
sion assessments, the third group, those who received the additional
metacognitive routine, were better at explaining the processes they used
to answer questions.
Perhaps the most compelling evidence for the efficacy of teaching
students to generate their own questions while reading comes from the
research cited in the subsequent section in which we move from

Effective Practices for Developing Reading Comprehension 223

 individual strategies to comprehension routines. The three routines
described—reciprocal teaching, transactional strategies instruction, and
Questioning the Author—are all research-based approaches to teaching
comprehension that, as a part of their overall approach, teach students
how to ask questions about text. That the question-generation strategy
works so well as part of a larger and more comprehensive routine sug-
gests that when it is implemented in classrooms, it is probably better to
use it not as a steady routine repeated for every text encountered, but as
an activity that is regularly but intermittently scheduled into guided or
shared reading.

Summary of the six individual comprehension strategies. To summarize,

we have identified six individual comprehension strategies that research
suggests are beneficial to teach to developing readers: prediction/prior
knowledge, think-aloud, text structure, visual representations, summa-
rization, and questions/questioning. Although somewhat different ter-
minology is used, these strategies were also identified by the recent
National Reading Panel (NRP) report (2000), commissioned by the U.S.
Congress to evaluate research in the area of beginning reading. The NRP
report also identified “Comprehension Monitoring” and “Cooperative
Learning” as effective comprehension strategies. We address compre-
hension monitoring to some degree in the section covering think-aloud.
We view cooperative learning as an instructional medium rather than a
comprehension strategy, and therefore have not included it in our analy-
sis. However, the assumption of collaborative work among students and
between the teacher and students is implicit in the overall approach to
comprehension we recommend in the first section of this chapter, as well
as in the comprehension routines discussed later.
A great deal of research suggests that vocabulary and comprehension
are inextricably linked. Thus, strategies related to ascertaining the mean-
ing of unknown words, as well as general vocabulary building, are also es-
sential to a strong program in comprehension instruction.

Effective Comprehension Routines

In this section we move from individual strategies—highly specific
processes that might be embedded into essentially any discussion of
text and combined with other strategies—to what we have termed com-
prehension routines. By using the term routine, we mean to capture the

224 Duke and Pearson

idea of an integrated set of practices that could be applied regularly to
one text after another, and in the process, provide students with two ben-
efits: (1) better understanding of the texts to which the routines are ap-
plied, and (2) the development of an infrastructure of processes that will
benefit encounters with future text, especially texts that students must
negotiate on their own. One of these routines, transactional strategies in-
struction, borders on being a complete comprehension curriculum. We
have chosen to focus on three routines—reciprocal teaching, transac-
tional strategies instruction, and Questioning the Author (QtA)—
although there are other research-tested practices that might be
characterized also as routines, such as the Directed Reading-Thinking
Activity (DR-TA) (e.g., Baumann et al., 1992) and Informed Strategies
for Learning (Paris, Cross, & Lipson, 1984).

Reciprocal teaching. Four comprehension strategies—predicting, ques-

tioning, seeking clarification, and summarizing—are the focus of the re-
ciprocal teaching approach. Originally developed by Annemarie Palincsar
(1982; also Brown & Palincsar, 1985; Palincsar & Brown, 1984), recipro-
cal teaching involves a gradual release of responsibility from teacher to
student for carrying out each part of the routine. In the early stages of the
reciprocal teaching, the teacher does much modeling of the target com-
prehension strategies. In some versions of reciprocal teaching, this in-
cludes direct teaching of each individual strategy and the use of
worksheets for practice strategies (e.g., Palincsar, Brown, & Martin, 1987).
As time goes on, students assume increasing control over strategy use,
eventually using the strategies with little or no teacher support.
A typical reciprocal teaching session begins with a review of the main
points from the previous session’s reading, or if the reading is new, pre-
dictions about the text based on the title and perhaps other information.
Following this, all students read the first paragraph of the text silently to
themselves. A student assigned to act as teacher then (a) asks a question
about the paragraph, (b) summarizes the paragraph, (c) asks for clarifi-
cation if needed, and (d) predicts what might be in the next paragraph.
During the process, the teacher prompts the student/teacher as needed,
and at the end provides feedback about the student/teacher’s work.
Reciprocal teaching sessions are intended to take approximately 30
minutes, and they can include more than one student in the role of
teacher each session. Although typically conducted in small groups, re-
ciprocal teaching has been conducted in one-to-one and whole-group
formats. The approach has been used with both good and struggling

Effective Practices for Developing Reading Comprehension 225

 readers. The following dialogues come from reciprocal teaching ses-
sions with students struggling with the technique:

T: What would be a good question about pit vipers that starts with the
word why?
S: (No response)
T: How about, “Why are the snakes called pit vipers?”
——
S: How do spinner’s mate is smaller than.... How am I going to say that?
T: Take your time with it. You want to ask a question about the spin-
ner’s mate and what he does, beginning with the word how.
S: How do they spend most of his time sitting?
T: You’re very close. The question would be “How does the spinner’s
mate spend most of his time?” Now you ask it.
——
T: That was a fine job, Ken, but I think there might be something to
add to our summary. There is more information that I think we
need to include. This paragraph is mostly about what?
S: The third method of artificial evaporation. (Palincsar & Brown,
1984, p. 138)

This next dialogue comes from a first-grade class employing recip-

rocal teaching.

S1: My question is, what does the aquanaut need when he goes under
water?
S2: A watch.
S3: Flippers.
S4: A belt.
S1: Those are all good answers.
T:` Nice job! I have a question too. Why does the aquanaut wear a belt?
What is so special about it?
S3: It’s a heavy belt and keeps him from floating up to the top again.
T: Good for you.
S1: For my summary now: This paragraph was about what aquanauts
need to take when they go under the water.
S5: And also about why they need those things.

226 Duke and Pearson

 S3: I think we need to clarify gear.
S6: That’s the special things they need.
T: Another word for gear in this story might be equipment, the equip-
ment that makes it easier for the aquanauts to do their job.
S1: I don’t think I have a prediction to make.
T: Well, in the story they tell us that there are “many strange and won-
derful creatures” that the aquanauts see as they do their work. My
prediction is that they’ll describe some of these creatures. What are
some of the strange creatures you already know about that live in the
ocean?
S6: Octopuses.
S3: Whales?
S5: Sharks!
T: Let’s listen and find out. Who’ll be our teacher? (Palincsar & Brown,
1986, p. 771)

The important role of the teacher as guide is evident throughout the

dialogues. In addition to the modeling and scaffolding represented here,
the teacher routinely reminds students of why these strategies are im-
portant and how they will help students in their reading.
Many studies have investigated the effectiveness of reciprocal teach-
ing. Rosenshine and Meister (1994) reviewed 16 studies of the technique
and concluded that reciprocal teaching is effective at improving compre-
hension of text. This was evident from both experimenter-developed
comprehension tests and, to a lesser extent, from standardized tests of
comprehension. In another review of research on the approach, Moore
(1988) also found reciprocal teaching to be effective across multiple
studies. Reciprocal teaching has been compared with many other ap-
proaches to comprehension instruction, including teacher modeling
alone, explicit instruction and worksheets alone, daily practice at reading
test passages and answering accompanying questions, and training at
locating information to address different kinds of comprehension
questions. In all cases, reciprocal teaching was found to be a more effec-
tive approach. (An innovation on reciprocal teaching known as
Collaborative Strategic Reading [CSR] has also been shown to be effec-
tive in multiple research studies, including studies of the approach’s
effectiveness with English Language Learners. For more information
about this approach, see Klinger and Vaughn [1999].)

Effective Practices for Developing Reading Comprehension 227

 Students Achieving Independent Learning (SAIL) and other transac-
tional strategies approaches. The Students Achieving Independent
Learning, or SAIL, program also teaches a package of comprehension
strategies. Used in Montgomery County, Maryland, USA, strategies em-
phasized in SAIL include predicting, visualizing, questioning, clarifying,
making associations (e.g., between the text and the students’ experiences),
and summarizing (Pressley et al., 1994). Use of these strategies is taught
through teacher think-aloud and explicit instruction. Students practice
the strategies in various settings, with an emphasis on student interpre-
tation of text. Indeed, SAIL and a similar program used at the Benchmark
School in Media, Pennsylvania, USA, have been characterized as transac-
tional strategies instruction because of their emphasis on transactions
among teacher, student, and text (Pressley et al., 1992).
In SAIL, the emphasis is on helping students learn when to use which
comprehension strategies. The program uses a range of different kinds of
texts that are often quite challenging for students because they are at or
above grade level. Consider this summary of a SAIL lesson from a
fourth-grade classroom:
• Teacher asks students to write a prediction about what the book will
be about based on its cover.
• Teacher begins reading the book, thinking aloud as she reads (e.g.,
“I wonder if that is the Georgetown in Washington, D.C.”; “August
must be the name of a person”).
• Students take turns reading aloud. As students read, the teacher cues
students to apply strategies as appropriate (e.g., “Tell us what has
been going on here”).
• Students spontaneously employ strategies they have learned in pre-
vious work, including seeking clarification, relating the text to their
lives, and visualizing (e.g., “I can see a...”).
• Students return to their written predictions to assess their accuracy.

As this summary suggests, there is not a predetermined sequence of

strategies to use in SAIL lessons. Rather, strategy use depends on the
situation; students must coordinate their repertoire of comprehension
strategies. Also, more attention is given to individual interpretation of
text than to “right answers.” Figure 10.4 lists the menu of strategies that
can be used in transactional strategies instruction. Two features of the
list are worth noting: First, it incorporates all the strategies within

228 Duke and Pearson

Figure 10.4. Basic components of transactional strategies
instruction
Cognitive Strategies Interpretive Strategies
Thinking aloud Character development
Imagining how a character might feel
Identifying with a character
Constructing images Creating themes
Summarizing Reading for multiple meanings
Predicting (prior knowledge activation) Creating literal/figurative distinctions
Questioning Looking for a consistent point of view
Clarifying Relating text to personal experience
Story grammar analysis Relating one text to another
Text structure analysis Responding to certain text features such as
point of view, tone, or mood

Strategies in italics are also a part of reciprocal teaching.

reciprocal teaching (on the cognitive side of the ledger). Second, the list
is long enough to guarantee selective application (based on the text and
the learning context) to any given text. There is no way that a teacher
could ensure that each strategy was applied to every text encountered
by a group of students.
Much of the research on SAIL and its intellectual cousin, transactional
strategies instruction, has been qualitative, looking in detail at the ways
that strategies are taught and learned. These studies suggest that SAIL and
similar programs offer a promising approach to comprehension instruc-
tion, with rich, motivating interactions around text and increasing so-
phistication of student strategy use over time. One quasi-experimental
study of SAIL has confirmed the effectiveness of the approach at im-
proving student comprehension (Brown, Pressley, Van Meter, & Schuder,
1996). In the study, second-grade students in SAIL classrooms outper-
formed students in comparable non-SAIL classrooms on standardized
measures of both reading comprehension and word attack. Students in
SAIL classrooms also remembered more content from their daily lessons
than students in non-SAIL classrooms. Additional evidence for the effi-
cacy of this “family” of transactional strategy instruction routines can be
found in Pressley’s (1998) recent review.

Effective Practices for Developing Reading Comprehension 229

 Questioning the Author. Beginning in the early 1990s, Isabel Beck and
Margaret McKeown, along with a group of colleagues at the University
of Pittsburgh and in the surrounding schools, began work on a com-
prehension routine called Questioning the Author (QtA). Inspired by
their own insights (see Beck, McKeown, Sandora, & Worthy, 1996,
p. 386) in revising text to make it more considerate (Beck, McKeown, &
Gromoll, 1989), Beck and her colleagues bootstrapped this approach to
engaging students with text. The idea was that if they, as knowledgeable
adult readers, found the process of trying to figure out what authors
had in mind in writing a text in a certain way helpful, perhaps students
would benefit from querying the author in a similar spirit. Hence, they
developed a set of “generic questions” that could be asked as a teacher
and group of students made their way through a text. The essential ap-
proach is to query a text collaboratively, section by section, with ques-
tions like those listed in Figure 10.5 as a guide.

Figure 10.5. Questions to guide the discussion in Questioning

the Author
Goal Candidate Questions
Initiate the discussion • What is the author trying to say?
• What is the author’s message?
• What is the author talking about?
Help students focus on the author’s • That is what the author says, but what
message does it mean?
Help students link information • How does that connect with what the
author already told us?
• What information has the author added
here that connects to or fits in with...?
Identify difficulties with the way the • Does that make sense?
author has presented information or • Is that said in a clear way?
ideas • Did the author explain that clearly? Why
or why not? What’s missing? What do we
need to figure out or find out?
Encourage students to refer to the text • Did the author tell us that?
either because they’ve misinterpreted a • Did the author give us the answer to that?
text statement or to help them recognize
that they’ve made an inference

230 Duke and Pearson

 The expectation is that students who receive this sort of approach to
text inquiry will develop improved understanding of the texts to which
the routine is applied, improved understanding of texts they meet on
their own at a later time, and most important, a critical disposition to-
ward texts in general. Ideally, this approach will help students to enter-
tain the possibility that a comprehension failure may have as much to do
with the author’s failure to provide a considerate message as it does with
the failure of the reader to bring appropriate cognitive and affective re-
sources to bear in trying to understand it.
The data on the efficacy of Questioning the Author (Beck et al., 1996)
are encouraging. First, with the support of a professional community,
teachers can learn to transform their text discussions from traditional
recitations to these more student-centered, interpretive, and decidedly
critical discussions. Second, when the routine is implemented, students
assume a greater role in the overall text discussions, nearly doubling their
piece of the discussion pie (compared with traditional discussions), and
they initiate many more interactions. Third, and most important, stu-
dents become much more successful at higher order comprehension and
monitoring their comprehension as a result of participating in
Questioning the Author. It is equally empowering to teachers and stu-
dents. Those who wish to implement this approach should consult the
works that Beck and her colleagues have written for classroom teachers
(Beck, McKeown, Hamilton, & Kucan, 1997).

Where Will Comprehension Research Go?

Some Challenges
There are many who believe that the kind of intense attention that has
been aimed at issues of decoding, particularly in recent years, will soon
turn to comprehension. Although this is desirable in terms of bringing
attention to an often “quiet” literature and increasing the extent to which
teachers, parents, and administrators think about how they teach (or
fail to teach) comprehension, it is worrisome in light of the character of
the decoding debates. Questions that worry us include the following:
• Will comprehension be understood in all of its complexity?
Even the brief description at the beginning of the chapter of
what good readers do when they read makes it clear that compre-
hension is complex. It has been difficult to convince many that de-
coding entails more than simply letter-by-letter “sounding out.” It

Effective Practices for Developing Reading Comprehension 231

 may also be difficult to convince many that comprehension is more
than just listening to the words you decode to see if they make
sense, and that it involves many different processes, that it entails a
multiplicity of different strategies, and that it means different things
in different contexts.
• Will we acknowledge that comprehension-learning is different for
different people?
Awareness of individual differences continues to be lacking in
much discourse on decoding. Will it be lacking in discourse on
comprehension? Will we come to terms with the notion that effec-
tive comprehension requires different kinds and amounts of in-
struction and experiences for different learners?
• Will our definition and fundamental understanding of comprehen-
sion keep pace with the changing nature of text?
We still tend to characterize comprehension of text, and read-
ing in general, as a linear process. This is true even though we know
that good readers, whether adults or children, do not read even tra-
ditional texts linearly. Readers routinely skip ahead to sections of a
text that they believe are most relevant to their reading goals or re-
turn to reread sections they first encountered much earlier in the
reading. Some texts, such as computer manuals, magazines, and
cookbooks, are almost never read from front to back. Even novels,
although often read front to back, are sometimes read nonlinearly.
A reader recently described to one of us how he usually skips the de-
scriptive parts of each chapter, but returns to them if he gets the
feeling he has missed an important detail. With the growing use of
hypertext, Web links, and texts that are really webs of many loosely
coupled but independently generated texts, increasingly more ma-
terial will have to be read in a nonlinear style. In the future, text nav-
igation may be linked with text comprehension.
• Will we question long-held or favorite assumptions about effective
reading comprehension instruction?
For example, we are guilty of routinely recommending that stu-
dents read “real texts for real purposes” in the course of their read-
ing comprehension instruction, although there is little or no
research to support this recommendation directly. Research cer-
tainly shows that children can develop strong comprehension using
authentic texts, but there is little or no research investigating
whether, for example, reading comprehension skills develop better

232 Duke and Pearson

 or more quickly when students are reading authentic texts rather
than texts written solely for comprehension instruction. There is
also little or no research investigating whether reading compre-
hension abilities develop better when students are reading texts for
reasons that go beyond simply learning to read. We suspect (in-
deed we believe) that both genuine texts and authentic purposes are
important aspects of quality comprehension instruction, and in the
face of missing evidence, we will continue to recommend both, but
neither can be unequivocally recommended with the force of com-
pelling empirical evidence.
• Will we ask questions about the optimal numbers and kinds of
comprehension strategies to teach?
As noted throughout this chapter, we now know of a number
of effective strategies, but we also suspect that there is a point of
diminishing returns. If two well-taught, well-learned strategies are
better than one, are three better than two, four better than three,
and so on? Again, the field could continue to focus on developing
additional effective strategies, but perhaps our attention is better fo-
cused on refining and prioritizing the strategies we already have.
• Will we ask the tough questions about reading comprehension
instruction?
In 1978, Dolores Durkin published her famous (perhaps infa-
mous) study documenting the paucity of comprehension instruc-
tion and explicit strategy explanations in elementary classrooms. As
our review documents, in the last 20 years we have learned a lot
about how to ameliorate the situation Durkin found. Even so, later
studies in the 1980s and 1990s have suggested that there is little read-
ing comprehension instruction in schools (e.g., Pressley & Wharton-
McDonald, 1998). We need to understand why many teachers do not
focus directly on comprehension strategies and routines, and we
need to learn more about how to help teachers provide good com-
prehension instruction. A central question is, How can and should
teachers embed all these research-documented practices into a cur-
riculum? It is one thing to demonstrate that if a comprehension
strategy is taught systematically over, say, a 10-week period, stu-
dents will benefit in terms of strategy acquisition, text comprehen-
sion, or even standardized test achievement. It is quite another to
figure out how to “curricularize” that strategy, along with all the
other research-proven strategies that might present themselves to a

Effective Practices for Developing Reading Comprehension 233

 teacher or a district curriculum committee for regular inclusion into
the reading program. Although each of the individual strategies and
routines we have discussed represents an admirable addition to the
comprehension curriculum, none could serve as the sole activity stu-
dents encountered day after day, selection after selection.

Thus, providing some variety both within and among selections

makes sense. We have little research, however, on optimal combinations
and distributions of various strategies over time. The closest we come
to any definitive research on this question is with Transitional Strategies
Instruction, which is portrayed by its developers more as a menu of ac-
tivities from which a teacher could select than as a subset of strategies
most appropriate for a particular story, book, or selection. In terms of
research, it would be useful to complement our knowledge of the effec-
tiveness of strategies when they are taught in special units with knowl-
edge of their value added to a comprehension curriculum. Without
finding better ways of bringing effective comprehension instruction to
classrooms, continued research refining particular comprehension in-
struction techniques will provide little or no real value.
These difficult questions must be addressed by teachers, teacher edu-
cators, and reading researchers. The stakes are too high to leave them
unanswered and unaddressed. In the meantime, however, we can take
some comfort in the knowledge that for the teacher who wants to work
directly with students to help them develop a rich repertoire of effective
comprehension strategies, the tools are available. We know a great deal
about how to help students become more effective, more strategic, more
self-reliant readers. It is time that we put that knowledge to work.

Summary
In this chapter, we have described effective individual and collective
strategies for teaching comprehension of text and discussed character-
istics of a balanced comprehension program into which such strategies
could be embedded. In Figure 10.6, we offer a tool for assessing the com-
prehension instruction environment in your own classroom. We hope
that this will aid readers in identifying both strengths and weaknesses
in comprehension instruction as well as serving as a summary of the ma-
terial presented in this chapter. We hope it will not prove overwhelm-
ing, even to those who are novices at comprehension instruction. Realize
that the use of even one of the techniques described in this chapter has

234 Duke and Pearson

Figure 10.6. A checklist for assessing the comprehension
environment and instruction in the classroom
About the overall reading program
• How much time do students spend actually reading?
• How much reading do students routinely do in texts other than those written solely
for reading or content area instruction?
• Do students have clear and compelling purposes in mind when reading?
• How many different genres are available to students within your classroom? How
many students read across genres?
• Do students have multiple opportunities to develop vocabulary and concept knowl-
edge through texts?
Through discussion of new ideas?
Through direct instruction in vocabulary and concepts?
• Are students given substantial instruction in the accurate and automatic decoding of
words?
• How much time do students spend writing texts for others to comprehend?
With reading-writing connections emphasized?
• Are students afforded an environment rich in high-quality talk about text?
About comprehension strategy instruction
• Are students taught to...
_ identify their purpose for reading?
_ preview texts before reading?
_ make predictions before and during reading?
_ activate relevant background knowledge for reading?
_ think aloud while reading?
_ use text structure to support comprehension?
_ create visual representations to aid comprehension and recall?
_ determine the important ideas in what they read?
_ summarize what they read?
_ generate questions for text?
_ handle unfamiliar words during reading?
_ monitor their comprehension during reading?
• Does instruction about these strategies include
_ an explicit description of the strategy and when it should be used?
_ modeling of the strategy in action?
_ collaborative use of the strategy in action?
_ guided practice using the strategy, with gradual release of responsibility?
_ independent practice using the strategy?
About other teaching considerations
• Are students helped to orchestrate multiple strategies, rather than using only one at a
time?
• Are the texts used for instruction carefully chosen to match the strategy and students
being taught?
• Is there concern with student motivation to engage in literacy activities and apply
strategies learned?
• Are students’ comprehension skills assessed on an ongoing basis?

Effective Practices for Developing Reading Comprehension 235

 been shown to improve students’ comprehension of text. In fact, in the
previous edition of this book, Pearson suggested that comprehension in-
struction is best when it focuses on a few well-taught, well-learned
strategies. Although we can now point to a litany of effective techniques,
that does not mean that using a litany of techniques will be effective.

Questions for Discussion

1. In this chapter we have argued that there is considerable research
on effective comprehension instruction, but that much of this
research is not reflected in classroom practice. Based on your
experience in schools and classrooms, do you agree? If so, why do
you think that this is the case?
2. Comprehension is addressed in a number of commercial reading
programs. With respect to comprehension instruction, what would
you be looking for in evaluating these programs?
3. Arrange to observe comprehension instruction in a local school and
classroom. What do you see as relative strengths and weaknesses
of comprehension curriculum and instruction in this classroom?
4. We suggest several challenges for future research on comprehension.
Which of these do you believe is most salient and why?

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OTHER RESOURCES
The reference section includes references to many books, chapters, and
articles that address specific comprehension strategies and approaches to

Effective Practices for Developing Reading Comprehension 241

 teaching them. There are also references to several reviews of research.
For more comprehensive discussions of comprehension instruction
written specifically for teachers, you might consult any of the following
recently published books on the topic:
Blachowicz, C., & Ogle, D. (2001). Reading comprehension: Strategies for independent
learners. New York: Guilford.
Block, C.C., & Pressley, M. (Eds.) (2001). Comprehension instruction: Research-based best
practices. New York: Guilford.
Keene, E.O., & Zimmerman, S. (1997). Mosaic of thought: Teaching comprehension in a
readers’ workshop. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

242 Duke and Pearson

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