The " RAP on Reading Comprehension

o •z. Mrs. Btvwn is the special education teacher for the third grade team at Casey Elementary School. Recently, the team realized that some of their students had problems with reading comprehension. As a part of their response to intervention (RTI) program, the team assesses students' reading fluency every 2 months using Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills (DIBELS; Good & Kaminski, 2002) to ensure students are improving and meeting district benchmarks. The team noticed that the majority of the third graders were meeting their fluency benchmarks and could decode at grade level, thus meeting their instructional goals. However, they also noticed that a few students were well behind their peers in reading comprehension skills despite the fact that their fluency was at or above district benchmarks. This came as a surprise to the team because they had always thought comprehension of text automatically followed fluent reading. They knew they had to address this issue immediately so these students wouldn't fall behind their peers; however, they weren't sure how to improve the comprehension skills of these students. Mrs. Brown suggested teaching the students a reading comprehension strategy. She suggested that they look for a simple and flexible comprehension strategy. They needed a strategy that could be taught individually or in small groups in the general education classroom or resource room. The strategy should also be one that students can master quickly. In addition, Mrs. Brown suggested teaching the strategy using the self-regukued strategy development (SRSD; Harris & Graham, 1996) model because she knew that how a strategy is taught is a critical factor in its success or failure (Reid & Lienetnann, 2006). The "RAP on Reading Comprehension