The Article

In practice, many educators do not consider “comprehension instruction” to be an important part of primary grade reading curriculum. In this chapter from Comprehension Instruction: Research-based Best Practices, Assistant Professor Nell K. Duke and P. David Pearson, dean of the School of Education at University of California at Berkeley, document three claims that support the position that early elementary children can benefit from reading programs that incorporate comprehension instruction.

Discussion

Pearson and Duke document these three claims by focusing their attention on a few key studies that all deal, at least in part, with students in the primary grades. Their first claim states that children improve in reading comprehension when teachers provide explicit instruction of comprehension strategies, such as identifying key elements in a story, predicting, questioning and making associations. In one study they reference, the researchers modeled a comprehensive approach called SAIL (Students Achieving Independent Learning). Their focus was not only on explicit instruction of strategies, but also on when and how to apply these strategies in actual reading. In second grade classrooms where SAIL instruction occurred, students performed better in reading and word attack than those children not in SAIL classrooms. In their second claim, Pearson and Duke state that reading comprehension improves when teachers design and implement activities that support the understanding of texts. They cite several studies in which such activities were evaluated. Findings showed that primary students performed better in comprehension with repeated readings of texts, shared-book readings (with partners or book-on-tape sessions) and through approaches that discussed experiences related to the text. Duke and Pearson’s final claim is that reading comprehension can be taught in tandem with decoding and word identification and benefit children even as young as kindergarten. In one study, exemplary first grade teachers were observed and interviewed concerning their decoding and comprehension reading instruction. The researchers found that these teachers had systematic methods for teaching these skills, where “comprehension was embedded in both the reading of storybooks and in guided reading lessons.”

What It Means To You

Pearson and Duke conclude that the most obvious implication of the studies they cite is that comprehension instruction should have a prominent place in primary-grade curricula. “To delay this sort of powerful instruction until children have reached the intermediate grades is to deny them the very experiences that help them develop the most important of reading dispositions--the expectation that they should and can understand each and every text they read.” To what extent does you district and teachers incorporate comprehension instruction in the primary grade reading curriculum?

For More Information

Pearson, P. D., & Duke, N. K. (2002). Comprehension instruction in the primary grades. In C.C. Block & M. Pressley (Eds.), Comprehension instruction: Research-based best practices (pp. 247-258). New York: Guilford.

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