RUNNING HEAD: INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES Individual Differences that Influence Reading Comprehension

Theories about reading have moved away from viewing the reader as a passive recipient of textual input, as a tabula rasa upon which the author sketches his or her message. Under this view, reading comprehension is easily explained by the success of the textual input entering and staying intact within the mind of the reader. Adopting this view, some character educators can assert that reading moral stories to children will build moral literacy and moral character, due to the nature of the stories themselves. That is, as long as the children ‘hear’ the stories, they will absorb the story messages. This is the view promulgated by former secretary of education, William Bennett, in his wildly popular book, The Book of virtues. Bennett (1993) contends that hearing moral stories will develop moral literacy, which then leads to moral character. There is no evidence for his claims. William Kilpatrick (1992) agrees with Bennett, saying that “good books do their own work in their own way” and “it is not necessary or wise for adults to explain the ‘moral’ in each story” (p. 268). In fact, there is evidence against the claims made by Bennett, Kilpatrick and others, evidence that will be reviewed in this chapter. Recent research has disconfirmed such a ‘passive reader’ theory. Instead, we find that the reader is an active comprehender who uses his or her knowledge and strategies to construct meaning from a text (Pressley & Afflerbach, 1995). The reading process resembles more the interaction of a breeze on a landscape. The breeze has an influence on the features, moving dirt and debris about and shaping erosion, but only so far as the structures of the landscape allow. Constructivist reading theory takes into account the nature of the reader (the landscape) in response to the textual input. Constructivist reading research tells us that at least five things about the reader matter in reading comprehension: reader skills, reader knowledge, reader cognitive development, reader culture, reader purpose. Leaving the discussion of general reading comprehension skills to others, this chapter address the influence of: (1) Reader expertise in the knowledge domain of the text; (2) The socio-moral cognitive development of the reader; (3) The degree to which the cultural assumptions of the text match those of the reader; (4) The reader’s purpose for reading (e.g., for fun or to study). All four factors concern elements that the reader brings to the reading situation and that affect the reader’s processing of the text.