Increasing the Inclusion of Reading Comprehension Strategies in Secondary Content-Area Classrooms

Today’s middle and high schools are flooded with readers who struggle to complete the academic tasks required of them. The Alliance for Excellent Education noted that approximately six million middle and high school students have very low literacy levels that affect achievement and content mastery in all subjects (Biancarosa & Snow, 2004). Perhaps the most important literacy task for our middle and high schoolers involves reading comprehension. For the purpose of this paper, reading comprehension will be defined as an active, problem-solving process; “Reading comprehension is intentional thinking during which meaning is constructed through interactions between text and reader ” (Durkin, 1993, p. 5). The academic importance of instruction in reading comprehension is certain. Students who are taught comprehension strategies such as predicting, questioning, and summarizing improve their reading comprehension scores on both experimenter-constructed and standardized tests (Pressley, 1998; Rosenshine, Meister, & Chapman, 1996). Though results suggest that secondary teachers can assist students in becoming proficient readers by arming them with a variety of comprehension strategies, the degree to which teachers provide such instruction is unclear