When learners can comprehend 98% or more of the tokens within a text, the lexical difficulty of the text is unlikely to inhibit reading comprehension (Schmitt et al., 2011). This phenomenon will be referred to as the Coverage Comprehension Model (CCM). The CCM is present in countless articles that describe the percentage of tokens necessary to…

Early reading intervention is crucial to ensure all students develop strong foundational literacy skills for academic and lifelong success. This Spotlight will help readers investigate the benefits of tutoring on early reading skills; identify how to build students' reading stamina; gain insights into knowledge-building curricula; review the…

The essays below were prepared following the LRA session organized by Janice Almasi entitled, "Examining the relative contributions of content knowledge and strategic processing to comprehension." What unites these essays are the personal and historical stances that each writer has taken; in addition, the essays are rich with…

This piece is framed by questions we are often asked when we talk about online reading assessments and instruction with teachers. We begin with some of the lessons we have learned in our own experiences with designing measures of online reading comprehension. Then we share our thoughts about key design considerations as well as some of the biggest…

Reading comprehension is multidimensional and complex. The persistent challenges children, adolescents, and even adults face with reading comprehension call for concerted efforts to develop assessments that help identify sources of difficulties and to design instructional approaches to prevent or ameliorate these difficulties. Doing so requires…

We reintroduce a wide-angle view of reading comprehension, the Reading Systems Framework, which places word knowledge in the center of the picture, taking into account the progress made in comprehension research and theory. Within this framework, word-to-text integration processes can serve as a model for the study of local comprehension…

We tested the effects of teaching reading skills through U.S. history content for 38 eighth-grade poor readers whose reading ability ranged from second-to fourth-grade levels. Half of the students received special education services, and half of the students were English language learners. Students were taught to decode multisyllabic words, learn…

We tested the effects of teaching reading skills through U.S. History content for 38 eighth-grade poor readers whose reading ability ranged from 2nd to 4th grade levels. Half of the students received special education services and half of the students were English Language Learners. Students were taught to decode multisyllabic words, learn…

Four tests were chosen for a study that investigated the hypothesis that individual differences in aural comprehension might anticipate individual differences in general information. A composite of eight subtest scores from the Test of General Information (TGI) was used as a measure of students' general knowledge. The Listening section of the…

In reading research, studies on good and poor reader characteristics abound. However, these findings remain largely scattered in applied linguistics and cognitive and educational psychology. This paper attempts to synthesize current theory and research on the topic in the past 20 years along 3 dimensions: language knowledge and processing ability,…

The theme of this report is that recent theory and research related to the cognitive domain of children's comprehension of stories have implications for the social domain of children's understanding of interpersonal interaction, since there are important overlaps between the abilities necessary to comprehend stories about social events and those…

This document reports the findings of a study of children's comprehension of stories containing inconsistent information. The subjects were 84 children in kindergarten and the second, fourth and sixth grades. Twelve subjects from each grade listened to two stories and twelve other subjects from grades 2, 4, and 6 read two stories. Each subject was…

Describes a study in which it was found that informational background has some effect on reading speed and comprehension. (TJ)

Investigates the direction of young children's reading comprehension skill in association with their ability to draw inferences and explores possible sources of inferential failure. Finds that the ability to make inferences was not a by-product of good reading comprehension, rather that good inference skills are a plausible cause of good reading…

Describes how a teacher-researcher used knowledge modeling as a basis for assessing students' knowledge. Discusses how the scoring template was created and how the students' recollections were scored. Finds that students with no prior knowledge of a subject were at a disadvantage in the classroom. (PRA)