Edited Volume

(2020)

This National Academy of Education (NAEd) report synthesizes findings from scholarship conducted over the past decade as part of a large-scale federal investment by the U.S. Institute of Education Sciences (IES) to improve reading comprehension of U.S. students. This report articulates findings and common themes concerning the nature and development, assessment, and the enactment of curriculum and instruction of reading comprehension. It synthesizes work both within and across the six research teams, reviewing over 200 scholarly articles from this substantial and unprecedented effort to determine what has been learned about understanding and improving reading comprehension. Key findings include: (a) the importance of emphasizing comprehension in pursuit of knowledge and insight; (b) redoubling our efforts to enhance language development, both oral and written, for students across the age-span; and (c) changing the culture of classrooms to emphasize collaboration, deep comprehension, critique, and the generative use of comprehension. Additionally, this project includes a paper that is a conceptual review of technology-related reading comprehension research, as well as research related to multimodal meaning-making (both digital and nondigital) and reading comprehension in out-of-school contexts, in order to highlight future directions for reading comprehension research that complement those indicated by the RfU teams.

Pearson, P. D., Palincsar, A. S., Biancarosa, G., & Berman, A. I. (Eds.). (2020). Reaping the Rewards of the Reading for Understanding Initiative. National Academy of Education. 10.31094/2020/2