Reading comprehension strategies theories, interventions, and technologies

McNamara Prelims.qxd 4/12/2007 11:20 AM Page x McNamara Prelims.qxd 4/12/2007 11:20 AM Page xi Preface What Is This About? Reading can be challenging, particularly when the material is unfamiliar, technical, or complex. Moreover, for some readers, comprehension is always challenging. They may understand each word separately, but linking them together into meaningful ideas often doesn’t happen as it should. These readers can decode the words, but have not developed sufficient skills to comprehend the underlying, deeper meaning of the sentences, the paragraphs, and the entire text. Comprehension refers to the ability to go beyond the words, to understand the ideas and the relationships between ideas conveyed in a text. The focus of this book is on the cognitive processes involved in comprehension, and moreover, on techniques that help readers improve their ability to comprehend text. The focus of this book is on reading comprehension strategies. Indeed, the use of effective reading comprehension strategies is perhaps the most important means to helping readers improve comprehension and learning from text. There is a great deal of evidence for the importance of reading strategies. One source of evidence is that successful readers know when and how to use deliberate strategies to repair comprehension. One implication from that finding is that teaching reading strategies to struggling readers may be a key toward helping them to improve comprehension. And it is. Teaching struggling comprehenders to use strategies improves their comprehension and their ability to learn from challenging text. Thus, the use of reading strategies is an integral part of normal comprehension and teaching reading strategies should be an integral part of K–14 education. What are reading comprehension strategies? To answer that question, let’s start with cognitive learning strategies, such as mnemonics. Mnemonics help people to remember things such as lists of items, a speech, or lines in a play. xi McNamara Prelims.qxd 4/12/2007 11:20 AM xii Page xii PREFACE For example, one example of a mnemonic to aid memory of a list of items is to imagine a well known spatial route and visually place each item in a particular location along the route. Then, to recall the items, the person imagines traveling the route and picking up each item along the way. Another mnemonic, called chaining, is to create sentences out of the words in the lists. For example, with the words, table, helicopter, saxophone, and leg a sentence such as ‘the table inside the helicopter had a saxophone for a leg’ would link the words visually, and thus the words would become more memorable. With practice, these types of memory aids can more than triple the number of items remembered. At first, these types of strategies take more time than just reading the list, but with practice, they become rapid, efficient, and effective—you remember more, with less effort. Likewise, reading strategies take more time at first, but with practice, help the reader to understand and remember much more from the text in less time than it would take without using reading strategies. For example, one reading strategy that pervades the literature is asking questions before, while, and after reading. At first, such a strategy will take the reader much more time and effort, and may even seem inefficient. But, with practice such strategies become more automatic, and then they become a natural part of reading. The focus of this volume is on why, when, and for whom such strategies are effective. This volume provides an overview of reading comprehension strategies and strategy interventions that have been shown empirically to be effective in helping readers to overcome comprehension challenges. This volume differs from other books that might be found on reading strategies in two important ways. First, there is a heavy focus throughout on theories of reading comprehension: How well do current models of reading comprehension account for the importance of reading strategies? And most important, how do theories of reading comprehension motivate and support reading comprehension interventions? Second, there is a focus on how current technologies can aid in helping teachers to provide reading strategy training to their students. One-on-one strategy training, and even focused group training is challenging for many teachers who are not specifically trained in reading and who don’t have time to divert energy away from the teaching of critical content. New technologies are described that help the teacher be better prepared to engage their students in reading strategies in the classroom. And, computer-based tutoring technologies are described that offer further solutions to teachers’ challenges by providing students with strategy training that can interact with and engage the student, and adapt to their individual needs. What Is in This Volume? This volume is divided into five sections. The first section includes four chapters that discuss theories of text comprehension, and in particular, the McNamara Prelims.qxd PREFACE 4/12/2007 11:20 AM Page xiii xiii role that theories have played in identifying strategies that characterize expert reading and strategies that can be effectively taught. Art Graesser presents an overview of theories of reading comprehension, with an emphasis on the status of comprehension strategies within reading theories. Panayiota (Pani) Kendeou, Paul van den Broek and colleagues discuss the potential importance of pre-reading comprehension strategies. They argue convincingly that comprehension skills develop early in children’s lives and that comprehension skills and basic reading skills (e.g., decoding) develop independently. The chapter by Jane Oakhill and Kate Cain carries forward that conclusion into early reading development. They present evidence that early competencies in skills related to inference making, comprehension monitoring, and understanding story structure causally influence comprehension development between the ages of 7 and 11, whereas skills related to decoding words have less influence on comprehension skill development. This section concludes with Michael Vitale and Nancy Romance’s knowledge-based account of comprehension that argues for the embedding of reading strategy instruction within content area classes. They posit that promoting the use of reading strategies in meaningful, content specific learning environments is a more effective approach to enhancing reading comprehension proficiency than engaging students in a series of unrelated stories. The second section looks at methods of using comprehension skill assessment to guide reading interventions. The chapter by Joe Magliano, Keith Millis and colleagues presents exciting new methods of automatically assessing deep level of comprehension by having students think aloud and answer questions while reading. They demonstrate that this type of method is more effective than more traditional standardized methods of assessment and shows greater promise in guiding individualized reading strategy interventions. The second chapter in this section, by Arthur Vander Veen, Kristen Huff and colleagues shows how a traditional, standardized method of measuring comprehension, the SAT, might nevertheless be used to guide comprehension interventions. Both of these chapters take novel approaches to comprehension assessment that are more tightly aligned with theories of reading comprehension and the critical role of reading strategies. The third section delves into the heart of the matter, successful reading comprehension strategy interventions. Doug and Lynn Fuchs describe their intervention, called Peer-Assisted Learning, which entails pairing children from preschool through the intermediate elementary grades to engage in reading activities including repeated reading, paragraph summaries, and making predictions. Joanna Williams describes her text structure intervention that teaches second grade students how to use the structure of the text to better understand content area readings. Art Glenberg, Beth Jaworski and colleagues describe an intervention to enhance imagery processes for first- and second-grade children McNamara Prelims.qxd xiv 4/12/2007 11:20 AM Page xiv PREFACE that involves either manipulating or imagining the process of manipulating toys that represent characters and objects in stories. John Guthrie, Ana Taboada and colleagues describe Concept-Oriented Reading Instruction (CORI), a broad strategy intervention for elementary school children that includes an emphasis on motivational practices for encouraging conceptual goal setting and affording student choice and collaboration. Finally, Alison King describes her intervention that helps elementary and middle school readers learn how to ask deep level questions while reading. The fourth section of the book contains seven chapters on exciting new technologies that provide children with dynamic scaffolds toward active comprehension and help teachers learn how to provide strategy training. Mina Johnson-Glenberg describes her 3D-Readers tutoring system that instructs and assesses elementary to middle school children in comprehension strategies such as visualization and question generation. Nicola Yuill’s new software engages pairs of 7 to 9 year old children in discussing joking riddles that play on meanings of words, thus increasing children’s awareness of inferences in text. Bonnie Meyer and Kay Wijekumar describe their tutoring system that teaches students to use knowledge about the structure of text while reading. Donna Caccamise, Marita Franzke and colleagues describe Summary Street, an interactive tutoring system that teaches middle school students how to summarize text more effectively through guided practice. Then, in chapter 16, I and my colleagues describe iSTART, a reading strategy tutor that teaches high school and college students how to self-explain text and use reading strategies such as making bridging inferences and elaborations while reading challenging text. Brigit Dalton and Patrick Proctor describe their use of universally designed digital literacy environments that scaffold reading strategy instruction for struggling elementary and middle school readers and students with learning disabilities. Finally, Annemarie Palincsar, Rand Spiro and colleagues describe their design of a hypermedia environment that uses new technologies to scaffold the use of videos to help teachers learn more effective techniques for providing children with reading comprehension instruction. Section 5 is a concluding chapter by myself and my colleagues that presents the 4-Pronged Comprehension Strategy Framework. This chapter organizes the various strategies described in this volume within a single framework and describes the theoretical and empirical rationale for the reading strategies included within the reading standards of the 2006 College Board English Language Arts College Board Standards for College Success™. McNamara Prelims.qxd 4/12/2007 11:20 AM Page xv PREFACE xv How Did This Volume Come About and Who Do We Have to Thank? This volume was preceded in May 2005 by a workshop at the University of Memphis. We met there to discuss our research and to find common ground among reading theorists and researchers developing and testing reading strategy interventions. The workshop was immensely useful, illuminating, and fun. The workshop was partially funded by the Institute for Intelligent Systems and the Department of Psychology at the University of Memphis; I am extremely grateful for the University’s support of research endeavors such as these. I am also grateful to many individuals who helped or organize that workshop, including the staff of the Institute of Intelligent Systems (Renee Cogar and Mattie Haynes) and the many student volunteers who helped make the conference a great success. I further thank the chapter reviewers for their dedication to the field. Although the chapters were reviewed primarily by the contributors to this volume, I also thank Roger Azevedo, Max Louwerse, Roger Taylor, and Phil McCarthy, for helping with the review process and Margie Petrowski for helping with the final preparation process of the volume. Finally, I am most grateful to those who contributed their chapters to this volume. Without the work that they have conducted to explore and understand reading strategies, reading strategy interventions, and theories of reading comprehension, this volume most certainly would not have been possible. I thank them for the research they are conducting and for their contributions to this volume. Who Should Read This Book? This collection of chapters will be of interest to researchers, educators, and students in the fields of psychology, reading, education, and tutoring technologies. I highly recommend this book to learn more about either reading comprehension or tutoring technologies. It would be particularly appropriate as a resource for a graduate course on reading. Essentially, this volume will interest anyone who wants to know more about how reading comprehension can improve by using effective, theoretically motivated reading strategies. —Danielle S. McNamara