Reading Comprehension: Reading for Learning

Readers The challenge of understanding reading comprehension derives, in part, from the difficulty of defining its borders. Comprehension was defined by the Research and Development (RAND) Reading Study Group (RRSG, 2002) as ‘‘the process of simultaneously constructing and extracting meaning through interaction and engagement with print.’’ This definition was intended to signal the importance of a number of key features of comprehension: the accurate decoding of print, a process of meaning construction through which inferences and information not available from the print are incorporated into the meaning representation, and active, motivated engagement from the reader. This definition works well for prototypical cases: the 10-year-old laughing while reading a joke book, the 15-year-old engrossed in a science fiction novel, and the 25-year-old being guided by a manual to install and run a new piece of software. The processes that occur during these prototypical comprehension events have been the subject of considerable research (see RRSG, 2002 for more detailed information about those processes), which has made clear that the success of any reading comprehension event is determined by variation on three dimensions: the text, the reader, and the task, all defined within a sociocultural context. The RRSG characterized successful comprehension as what occurs when the demands of the text, the challenges of the task, and the skills and proclivities of the reader are all well aligned, as exemplified by the prototypical cases listed above. Any pair of these dimensions can be the site of a mismatch that causes comprehension to fail and, as is described below, each introduces some ambiguity about where real reading comprehension begins and ends.