Research on Teaching Comprehension - Guilford Press

This is a chapter excerpt from Guilford Publications. Comprehension Instruction: Research-Based Best Practices, Second Edition edited by Cathy Collins Block and Sheri R. Parris. Copyright ? 2008

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Research on Teaching Comprehension

Where We've Been and Where We're Going

CATHY COLLINS BLOCK and GERALD G. DUFFY

Let us not be content to wait and see what will happen, but give us the determination to make the right things happen.

--PETER MARSHALL

This is a particularly relevant time to be writing about how to teach comprehension. As we began this chapter, the 30th anniversary of Durkin's (1978/1979) landmark comprehension study was upon us. Her findings jarred the profession's consciousness about what it meant to teach comprehension and created a more focused reading comprehension research agenda. May 2008 also marked the 30th anniversary of the first book dedicated solely to research-based comprehension practices, Teaching Comprehension (Pearson & Johnson, 1978). Three years later, Comprehension in Teaching: Research Reviews (Guthrie, 1981) became the first book to synthesize comprehension research. It contained only 12 chapters.

Since that time, huge strides have been made. Several important books more than 300 pages in length and many landmark studies were completed. Among these works were Comprehension Instruction: Research-Based Best Practices (Block & Pressley, 2002); Explaining Reading: A Resource for Teaching Concepts, Skills, and Strategies (Duffy, 2003); Handbook of Research in Comprehension (Duffy & Israel, 2008); Improving Comprehension Instruction: Rethinking Research, Theory, and Classroom Practice (Block, Gambrell, & Pressley, 2002); Mosaic of Thought: The Power of Comprehension Strategy Instruction (Keene & Zimmerman, 1997, 2007); Progress in Understanding Reading (Stanovich, 2000); Reading at Risk: A Survey of Literacy Practices in America (National Endowment for the Arts, 2004); Reading for Understanding: Towards an R&D Program in Reading Comprehension (RAND Reading Study Group, 2001);

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THEORETICAL DIRECTIONS

and, Verbal Protocols of Reading: The Nature of Constructively Responsive Readings (Pressley & Afflerbach, 1995).

Let's fast-forward from 1978 to today. Can you determine the year in which the following prominent research team's citation was written?

There is absolutely no doubt that reading comprehension strategy instruction is a "hot" topic. Entire books are written about it. Journals are publishing a lot of articles, and entire special editions are dedicated to it. . . . The short term goal is to teach children facilitating cognitive processes and when to use them to read for understanding. The long term goal is to encourage "automatic" application of appropriate strategies to appropriate domains.

You may have judged this statement to have been written within the last few years, because its goals are those toward which we strive today. However, Pressley, Symons, Snyder, and Cargilia-Bull (1989, p. 16) wrote these words almost 20 years ago. Our objective for including it here was threefold. First, we wanted to demonstrate that a lot of hard work concerning comprehension strategy instruction occurred between 1978 and 1989. Second, much new research must be completed before the goals stated by Pressley, Symons, and colleagues can be realized. Third, in our review of instructional research in comprehension, we became increasingly aware that progress in this field is moving more slowly than desired. Consequently, our goals in this chapter are as follows:

? To summarize established research findings about comprehension instruction. ? To report more recent insights. ? To describe how evidence can be applied to classrooms. ? To suggest future directions for research and practice.

ESTABLISHED RESEARCH FINDINGS ABOUT COMPREHENSION INSTRUCTION

In 1981, the Center for the Study of Reading at the University of Illinois was the first scientific body to issue a mission statement relative to comprehension instruction: "The challenge is to develop direct methods for teaching basic reading comprehension skills . . . to tens of thousands of children who, in the absence of explicit instruction, are not acquiring these skills today. This is a challenge we accept with enthusiasm" (Anderson, 1981, p. 6). In the years that followed a variety of researchers examined (1) what comprehension strategies should be taught, (2) the impact of directly teaching comprehension strategies, and (3) the process teachers go through in learning to teach comprehension strategies.

What Comprehension Strategies Should Be Taught?

During this early period of research on comprehension instruction, researchers identified what a comprehension strategy is, how many strategies students need to comprehension well, and at what developmental and/or age level a particular strategy should be taught.

Regarding the nature of comprehension strategies, there were efforts to distinguish conceptually between "skills" and "strategies." For instance, Duffy and Roehler (1987) emphasized that whereas skills are procedures applied in the same way every time with-

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out conscious thought, strategies are reasoned plans that are applied consciously and adapted to the particular situation. For instance, recognition of sight words is a skill that is learned to automaticity, but comprehension strategies, such as predicting, cannot be done thoughtlessly, because different texts and different reader purposes call for different kinds of background knowledge and must be applied situationally.

Regarding how many strategies to teach, the list of necessary strategies has become shorter in recent years. For instance, from 1987 to 1997, commercial reading materials recommended that as many as 45 different comprehension strategies be taught in a single year (Dewitz, Jones, & Leahy, 2006; Pressley, 1993; Pressley, Johnson, Symons, McGoldrick, & Kurita, 1989). These strategies, listed on the left side of Table 2.l, are still contained in some core reading programs today. More recently, however, the trend has been to teach fewer, rather than more, comprehension strategies in a year, and to teach them thoroughly.

In summary, the research initiated in the 1970s and 1980s by the Center for the Study of Reading, and continued by others, established that comprehension is a strategic process; that is, good readers proactively search for meaning as they read, using text cues and their background knowledge in combination to generate predictions, to monitor those predictions, to repredict when necessary, and generally to construct a representation of the author's meaning. To date, this strategic process has usually been described in terms of individual comprehension strategies, and the focus of instruction has usually been on teaching individual strategies.

Research on the Effect of Directly Teaching Comprehension Strategies

The earliest research on comprehension instruction focused on techniques teachers could use to encourage children to approach text in ways that promoted comprehension. Four early models were of particular importance. The first, called the "experience?text? relationship method," emphasized tying experience background and text cues together to construct meaning (Au, 1979). A second model was called "K-W-L" (for "what you Know already," "what you Want to know," and what you Learned from your reading"), and focused readers on the active thinking required to comprehend (Ogle, 1986). In a third, called "reciprocal teaching," teacher and students queried each other around four specific strategies (predicting, questioning, clarifying, and summarizing; Palincsar & Brown, 1984). In a fourth model, QAR (question?answer relationships), readers were taught to assess whether an author provides information explicitly, or whether the reader will have to infer or go beyond what the author provides (Raphael & Wonnacott, 1985).

Research established that such early instructional techniques were effective. However, because these techniques did not provide students with explicit explanations about how to think their way through text, there was a movement in the 1980s and early 1990s to study the benefits of teaching comprehension strategies more directly. This effort emphasized putting readers in control of how to reason by providing clear and unambivalent information about how strategies work. Subsequently, several studies established that struggling readers particularly benefit from explicit explanations of how to think with strategies, with subjects showing growth in both achievement and metacognitive awareness of what they are doing when comprehending (see e.g., Dewitz, Carr, & Patberg, 1987; Dole, Brown, & Trathen, 1996; Duffy et al., 1987; Pressley et al., 1992).

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TABLE 2.1. Recommended Comprehension Strategies to be Taught--Past and Present

Strategies proposed from 1978 through 2000

Strategies that have been researched and validated to be highly successful since 2000

1. Setting a purpose 2. Interpreting text structures 3. Being alert to main ideas 4. Knowing the most important ideas attached to

author's goal 5. Relating what one reads to prior knowledge 6. Asking questions 7. Drawing conclusions 8. Changing the hypothesis 9. Adding to themes as the meaning of a text

unfolds 10. Predicting 11. Creating mental imagery 12. Making conscious images that relate to what is

read in a text and using one's own and the prior knowledge presented in that text 13. Identifying the gist 14. Learning to choose which strategy would be helpful 15. Interpreting author's intentions 16. Paraphrasing 17. Pausing to reflect 18. Interpreting and generating insights using fix-up strategies 19. Monitoring while reading 20. Rereading when something isn't clear 21. Evaluating the text as to how well or how poorly it is written 22. Noting whether one should recommend a text to others 23. Consciously constructing a summary 24. Self-regulating one's own comprehension 25. Internalizing text 26. Corroborating text 27. Contextualizing text 28. Being retrospective about text 29. Actively listening 30. Using mnemonics 31. Organizing text 32. Independently engaging one's own metacognition 33. Using study skills while reading 34. Reorganizing text 35. Completing content analyses 36.?42. Using and being aware of the seven parts of story grammar as aids to comprehending 43. Constructing self-explanations 44. Elaborating on one's understanding 45. Clarifying meanings

l. Predict--Size up a text in advance by looking at titles, text features, sections, pictures, and captions, continuously updating and repredicting what will occur next in a text.

2. Monitor--Activate many comprehension strategies to decode and derive meaning from words, phrases, sentences, and texts.

3. Question--Stop to reread and initiate comprehension processes when the meaning is unclear.

4. Image--Construct meanings expressed in text by wondering, noticing, and generating mental pictures.

5. Look-backs, rereads, and fix-it strategies--Continue to reflect on the text before, during, and after reading, continuously deciding how to shape the knowledge base for personal use.

6. Infer--Connect ideas in text based on personal experiences, knowledge of other texts, and general world knowledge, making certain that inferences are made quickly so as not to divert attention from the actual text but to help the reader better understand it.

7. Find main ideas, summarize, and draw conclusions--Make sure to include information gained from story grammar or textual features; if students can't make a valid summary of information read to date, this is the signal to go back to reread.

8. Evaluate--Approach a fictional text expecting to (and making certain that students do) note the setting, characters, and story grammar early on, with problems, solutions, and resolutions to occur thereafter.

9. Synthesize--Approach an informational text watching for textual features, accessing features, unique types of information, sequence of details and conclusions, and combining all of these to make meaning.

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Still other studies established that such direct teaching is effective at various grade levels. For instance, such methods produced highly significant gains in students' achievement by grade 2 (Brown, Pressley, Van Meter, & Schuder, 1996), grades 2?8 (Block, 1993, 1999; Collins, 1991), and grades 6?8 (Anderson, 1992; Anderson & Roit, 1993).

In summary, such studies established that without explicit teacher explanation and intensive scaffolded assistance, many struggling readers fail to comprehend (Duffy, et al., 1987; Pressley, Johnson, et al., 1989; Pressley, Symons, et al., 1989). Comprehension becomes such a challenge for struggling readers that they avoid it, and a downward spiral results.

How Teachers Learn to Teach Comprehension Strategies

Pioneering investigations determined that highly effective teachers monitored their students' understanding, and were " `reactive-corrective' (i.e., they could observe and redirect pupils who failed to comprehend a text)" (Duffy & McIntyre, 1982, p. 17). However, without professional development, teachers had difficulty implementing explicit comprehension explanations. Even as late as 1999, many educators reported that they did not know how to provide effective comprehension instruction; others believed that students could learn how to comprehend merely by reading a lot (Block & Pressley, 2007).

New professional development programs resulted. For instance, Duffy et al. (1986) examined how to help teachers learn to explain comprehension strategies effectively, teach comprehension, and know when initial instructional lessons did not help students apply comprehension strategies independently. These and other, similar studies used various formats. Some sessions lasted 2 hours, whereas others were conducted 8 hours a day for 6 days, or continued once a month for 4?9 months (e.g., Collins, 1991; Duffy, 1993). Data from these efforts suggested that it took at least 4 months of professional development before teachers' explicit comprehension strategy instruction resulted in significant growth for less able readers (see summaries of research in Collins, 1991; Duffy, 1993; Pressley, 1993). Duffy and Hoffman (1999) concluded that teachers need to be educated to

"know that good teaching requires doing the right thing in the right way at the right time in response to problems posed by particular people in particular places on particular occasions" (Garrison, 1997, p. 271). No two situations are exactly the same; no two days are the same. Practices that work one day may not work the next; [comprehension] methods that worked on Tuesday with John may not work later the same day with Mary. So, rather than chaining themselves to a particular method or program for all kids, [they] are collectors of methods. They impose harmony on inherently uncertain and ambitious classroom environments by cutting across philosophical lines, combining methodological techniques, and adapting programs and materials to particular needs of students (p. 11).

MORE RECENT RESEARCH FINDINGS ABOUT COMPREHENSION INSTRUCTION

The most recent comprehension research has resulted in increased sophistication and understanding regarding how to teach comprehension. As in the previous section, these understandings are discussed in terms of what has been learned about comprehension strategies, about direct teaching of those strategies, and about how to develop educators' abilities to teach comprehension.

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