Knowledge for Teaching Reading Comprehension: Mapping the Terrain.

Abstract

The persistent underachievement of U.S. students in the area of reading comprehension has been documented in numerous high profile reports. While there are likely many factors that contribute to this underachievement, it is significant that studies repeatedly demonstrate that U.S. children are not taught how to comprehend text and that teachers report feeling unprepared to teach students to do so.

This dissertation examines reading comprehension instruction in seven 4th and 5th grade classrooms. The purpose of the study is to closely investigate what teachers know and do in the course of teaching reading comprehension in order to hypothesize why it is that most U.S. students do not learn to comprehend text well and what teachers would need to know and be able to do in order to feel prepared to teach reading comprehension skillfully.

Drawing from a corpus of videotaped lessons, interviews with teachers about their work, and artifacts that purport to define the knowledge base for teaching reading comprehension, the study is organized around the following key questions:

1. What is it that a small sample of teachers are doing when they say they are teaching reading comprehension?

2. What are potential constraints and influences on teachers’ enactment of reading comprehension instruction?

3. How has the field of reading conceptualized the knowledge base for teaching reading comprehension?

Findings from the study highlight several notable trends. First, while analysis of classroom data suggest considerable variability regarding what counts as reading comprehension instruction, this variability can, in part, be attributed to the ways in which reading comprehension instruction has been characterized in policy, assessments, and the resources that are available to teachers. Importantly, analyses expose a fundamental disjuncture between how leading literacy scholars define reading comprehension and how reading comprehension is conceptualized in other resources. Analyses also suggest that the knowledge base for teaching reading comprehension has been articulated in superficial ways and without the guidance of a coherent theoretical framework. The dissertation ends with a proposal of a theory of knowledge for teaching reading comprehension.