Reading Comprehension Research: Schema, Simple View of Reading, and the Rope [Comprehension Instruction Part 1/3]

How do you teach reading comprehension? Perhaps that is question you, or your colleagues, have asked. It’s a legitimate question; reading comprehension is very complex, with a lot of moving pieces. Further, there’s a lot of ongoing conversation about how reading comprehension instruction should (or should not) look like. But, what does research say about reading comprehension instruction? The next three episodes will explore reading comprehension research, and what it means for your instruction. First up, this episode outlines three popular theoretical models of reading comprehension; schema theory (Anderson, 1984); the Simple View of Reading (Gough & Tunmer, 1986), and the Reading Rope (Scarborough, 2001). I provide a brief overview of each model, as well as their strengths an limitations. Next up, I will talk about Kintsch’s (1988; 2019) Construction-Integration model and why every teacher of reading comprehension should be very interested in what this model has to say. Thank you for supporting the show! Share this episode with a colleague, or leave a review on Apple Podcasts. References Anderson, R. C. (1984). Comprehension, Learning, and Memory. Learning to read in American schools: Basal readers and content texts, 243-257. Cervetti, G. N., Pearson, P. D., Palincsar, A. S., Afflerbach, P., Kendeou, P., Biancarosa, G., … & Berman, A. I. (2020). How the Reading for Understanding initiative’s research complicates the simple view of reading invoked in the science of reading. Reading Research Quarterly, 55, S161-S172. Gough, P. B., & Tunmer, W. E. (1986). Decoding, reading, and reading disability. Remedial and special education, 7(1), 6-10. Scarborough, H.S. (2001). Connecting early language and literacy to later reading (dis)abilities: Evidence, theory, and practice. In S. B. Neuman & D.K. Dickson (Eds.) Handbook of early literacy research (pp. 97-125, New York, NY; Guilford Press. Unrau, N. J., Alvermann, D. E., & Sailors, M. (2019). Literacies and their investigation through theories and models. Theoretical models and processes of reading, 7, 3-34. Wang, Z., Sabatini, J., O’Reilly, T., & Weeks, J. (2019). Decoding and reading comprehension: A test of the decoding threshold hypothesis. Journal of Educational Psychology, 111(3), 387.