Five Decades of Comprehension Research: Informing the Future

Abstract

This article shares insights from a symposium celebrating the retirement of P. David Pearson, one of the most influential reading researchers of the last half-century. Presenters addressed the nature, instruction, and assessment of reading comprehension, teacher learning and comprehension, and the texts and contexts of comprehension. Collectively, the sessions offered the opportunity to reflect on what we have learned over five decades of comprehension research and practice and to engage with questions about the work that lies ahead. In particular, presenters called for renewed efforts to link comprehension instruction to students’ roles as agents and actors; to embrace complex views of readers, texts, and contexts; and to foreground teachers’ roles in their own learning about comprehension and in instructional reform efforts.

P. David Pearson is among the most influential reading researchers of the last half-century. Pearson’s scholarship has addressed many aspects of reading instruction, but none more than reading comprehension. Thus, a retirement symposium designed as a celebration of Pearson’s professional contributions also provided an opportunity to take stock—to look back over five decades of comprehension research and practice at what we have learned and to engage with questions about the work that lies ahead. In this article, I draw on the symposium presentations to share key themes of Pearson’s work on the nature, instruction, and assessment of comprehension; teacher learning and comprehension; and the texts and contexts of comprehension and then offer challenges and opportunities for the future.

Major Contributions

From Assessing Comprehension to Teaching It

Pearson was a central figure in work at the Center for the Study of Reading (CSR) during the 1980s, a time when reading researchers were concerned with developing richer and more instructionally relevant conceptualizations of reading comprehension. Pearson and his colleagues worked to uncover the skills and strategies involved in successful reading comprehension and to develop instructional approaches that support students’ acquisition of these skills and strategies.

Robert Tierney described his work with Pearson at CSR as an early attempt to look at literacy through the lens of students and teachers in classrooms. At the time, the field of literacy education was dominated by psychologists whose descriptions of reading comprehension were based mainly on research conducted in university psychology classes. As they became more involved in classroom-based comprehension research, Tierney and Pearson began to question the portrayal of reading comprehension as a linear progression from literal to inferential to evaluative and became interested in viewing readers through a writer’s eye (Pearson & Tierney, 1984; Tierney & Pearson, 1981). They worked to advance understanding of how teachers could support comprehension through instruction that focused on teaching reading processes much like those employed in composition.

Like Tierney, Janice Dole recalled the efforts at CSR to understand the cognitive processes of reading and the implications for instruction. Dole described how she and her CSR colleagues were inspired by the work of Durkin (1978), whose observational studies of comprehension instruction found little evidence of attention to supporting the development of strategic, self-regulated readers. The CSR researchers, including Dole, Pearson, and colleagues (e.g., Dole, Duffy, Roehler, & Pearson, 1991), asked, “How do you teach students the strategic and conditional knowledge for reading comprehension?” They identified a small set of strategies (determining importance, summarizing information, drawing inferences, generating questions, and monitoring comprehension) and advocated for the importance of directly instructing these strategies with students who struggled to comprehend text. They also began to describe how teachers could instruct the strategies.

Taffy Raphael discussed her work with Pearson on Question–Answer Relationships (QAR; Raphael & Pearson, 1985), an example of their efforts to apply new understandings about comprehension processes to classroom practice. Raphael recalled the origins of QAR at CSR in the 1970s and 1980s when reading researchers were beginning to investigate how comprehension instruction might build upon exciting new ideas such as schema theory and metacognition. QAR was born when Raphael observed students struggling to answer questions with clear text-based answers and hesitating to draw on their own knowledge to answer questions that called for such connections. QAR was an attempt to “let kids in on the secret” of how questions about texts vary in their task demands and how readers bring their knowledge to a text and add to their knowledge as a result of reading. When QAR began, virtually all comprehension questions were known-answer questions. Now, few teachers would argue against the value of authentic, inquiry-driven questions. And, although we are still learning how to teach comprehension, no one is asking whether comprehension can be taught.

Augmenting and Documenting Our Knowledge About Effective Instruction and Effective Schools

In Pearson’s years with the Center for Early Reading Achievement (CIERA) and beyond, his work turned in part toward efforts to achieve widespread implementation of effective reading instruction that built upon research from CSR. Pearson became deeply involved in efforts aimed at teacher learning and instructional change through the translation of research to practice and comprehensive reform efforts. In reflecting on Pearson’s work on teacher learning, Sarah Woulfin discussed how Pearson and colleagues offered an image of teachers as powerful agents of instructional improvement and encouraged us to place the realities of classrooms at the center of our efforts to understand instruction and improvement.

Nell Duke described two research-to-practice papers on teaching comprehension that she and Pearson coauthored nearly a decade apart (Duke & Pearson, 2002; Duke, Pearson, Strachan, & Billman, 2011). Duke discussed shifts between the papers as a reflection of how understandings about comprehension instruction had evolved. Most notably, the later paper includes a wider range of approaches to supporting text comprehension. Although the bulk of the 2002 paper was about effective comprehension strategy instruction, the 2011 paper offered an array of essential elements of effective comprehension instruction, including a focus on disciplinary and world knowledge, increasing reading volume, creating motivating texts and contexts, text discussion, and the integration of reading and writing. Duke also noted that the later paper displaced the “good reader/bad reader” paradigm, offering a more nuanced treatment of the question of what good readers do when they read and recognizing how struggle and success are related to complex constellations of factors. Today, we are asking about struggle and success: “In what contexts, with what kinds of texts and what kinds of situations, and with what reading purposes?”

Barbara Taylor recalled her collaboration with Pearson and others on the CIERA School Change Project (e.g., Taylor, Pearson, Peterson, & Rodriguez, 2005). Taylor, Pearson, and colleagues worked with high-poverty schools across the country to implement a school improvement and teacher professional development program grounded in research on effective schools, effective schoolwide reading improvement, and effective reading instruction. They found that schools that implemented more elements of the School Change framework experienced greater growth in students’ reading scores across the school year. The researchers also identified specific practices that were related to student growth, including teachers’ use of higher level questioning, coaching, small-group instruction, and instruction that elicited active responding from students. Taylor discussed both the efficacy of the overall framework and the particular importance of the feedback given to teachers about their teaching practice for fueling improvement.

Toward Richer, More Authentic Assessments

Starting in his time at CSR, Pearson was deeply involved in efforts to reconceptualize the assessment of reading comprehension and vocabulary in ways that provide more nuanced and accurate representations of students’ reading and richer information to guide classroom instruction. Collectively, the presentations about assessments described conceptual and practical advances resulting from coauthored work with Pearson, but they also acknowledged the distance yet to travel in seeing these advances widely implemented.

Karen Wixson recalled a time in the late 1980s when reading researchers were beginning to challenge traditional approaches to reading assessment. Wixson, Pearson, and colleagues were asking how the theories of comprehension being advanced at CSR could be applied to the development of reading assessment goals, frameworks, and actual test items. Wixson described a collaboration that grew out of work on statewide reading assessment in Illinois and Michigan (Valencia, Pearson, Peters, & Wixson, 1989). Unlike traditional assessments, those developed in these initiatives used authentic or naturally occurring full-length texts, included items designed to integrate and apply reading rather than to simply remember the text, and accounted for many factors known to influence comprehension, including students’ topic knowledge, metacognitive skills, and interests. Although many of these innovations are absent in the new generation of statewide tests, the framework they created is still relevant and influential in research and classroom practice.

Georgia García discussed a literature review that she and Pearson conducted, in which they examined norm-referenced and criterion-referenced assessments as cultural and political artifacts, asking about the implications of the assessments for students from diverse backgrounds (García & Pearson, 1994). In the review, they described content bias in existing assessments as well as bias in the use and misuse of assessments and test data. In doing so, they articulated core issues that are still pressing today, including questions about the appropriate use of assessments and the need to focus on providing resources and opportunities to learn. García suggested that some of the proposed approaches to assessment—including linking assessments to standards, using longer passages, and including constructed rather than multiple-choice items—had not realized the goal of mitigating bias. As such, the issues raised in the review require continued work.

Peter Afflerbach described an article that he coauthored with Pearson and Scott Paris (Afflerbach, Pearson, & Paris, 2008) in which they worked to clarify the terms skills and strategies, defining the former as automatic processes and the latter as processes requiring attention and intention, as well as the relationship between them. They proposed that paying attention to the differences between skills and strategies is important for developing useful assessments and effective instruction. In particular, understanding the strategies being used by students requires the kinds of formative assessment that offers process information. Summative assessment requires large backward inferences about students’ strategies and thus offers less useful information about students’ strategy use and development.

Michael Kamil discussed an article that he coauthored with Pearson and Elfrieda Hiebert (Pearson, Hiebert, & Kamil, 2007), in which they investigated vocabulary assessments—what they measure and could measure and how research might improve vocabulary research and instruction. Pearson et al. traced the history of vocabulary assessments and offered recommendations, including the need to clarify different aspects of vocabulary knowledge and to consider methods of assessment in relation to different text genres. Kamil concluded, however, that these recommendations have not yet been taken up in vocabulary research.

Challenging Static and Simplistic Notions of Reading Skill

Throughout his career, Pearson has challenged simplistic, decontextualized characterizations of readers and reading, leading efforts to approach comprehension as involving an array of individual, textual, and contextual factors.

Kate Frankel explored how Pearson’s work brought into view the importance of conceptualizing reading as a means of becoming “active and agentive contributors to the world.” She described the impact of Pearson’s work, which called us to conceptualize meaning as negotiated between self, author of text, and others through discussion and to approach reading not simply as a cognitive endeavor but also as personal, social, and economic one. Frankel described how these ways of thinking about meaning making influenced her own scholarship, which seeks to understand how adolescents understand the knowledge and skills required to become good readers and to work with teachers to codesign spaces where reading is personal and social.

Freddy Hiebert described her work with Pearson on features of text complexity that influence comprehension. Hiebert noted that some of Pearson’s early work examined grammatical features of text in relation to reading comprehension but that readability formulas gained prominence around the same time, eclipsing more nuanced examinations of text complexity. Hiebert described a recent paper (Pearson & Hiebert, 2014) that represents a reemergence in this line of work prompted by recent work on qualitative writing rubrics. Pearson and Hiebert analyzed qualitative approaches to text complexity, concluding that although qualitative approaches can be used in damaging ways—for example, leading students to think of themselves as rigidly situated in particular levels in spite of the imprecision of leveling assignments—there is hope. Efforts are under way to use large text and lexical databases to better understand the characteristics of texts and word features and how these are represented in texts within and across levels. Hiebert called for more work on the features that actually make text more and less accessible, so that we might design better texts for early readers.

Yukie Toyama presented a paper in a related line of work, coauthored with Pearson and Hiebert (Toyama, Hiebert, & Pearson, 2017), in which they examined the degree to which passages on reading inventories look similar across parallel, same-grade forms and exhibit a progression of complexity across levels. The study was motivated by concerns that the passages are being used to level students, even though little is known about the reliability of the passages. They found that the assessment tools varied in terms of the complexity of the texts at particular grade levels and in terms of the variability within and across levels. Toyama et al. found promise in new metrics of readability, perhaps because they do more to account for vocabulary demands.

Looking to the Future of Reading Research and Practice: Challenges and Opportunities

Many of the symposium presenters shared key challenges and opportunities for literacy educators and researchers moving forward, inspired by and building upon Pearson’s work. Among these were

• approaching readers as active and agential as we reconsider the sometimes passive nature of comprehension instruction and link comprehension to students’ roles as agents and actors;

• embracing complex views of readers, texts, and contexts as we consider disciplinarity, diversity, complex comprehension tasks, and multiple text comprehension and as we find new ways to prepare readers to engage with complex ideas and texts in the interest of meaningful activity; and

• supporting teachers in an ocean of reforms as we envision ways to foreground teachers’ roles in their own learning and in instructional reform efforts.

Approaching Readers as Active and Agential

Reflecting on his work with Pearson on schema theory, Richard Anderson discussed ways that comprehension instruction may be making comprehension worse, rather than better. He suggested that although we describe comprehension as active, we often position readers as relatively passive recipients of others’ ideas. Anderson urged literacy educators to attribute greater agency to readers as they embody roles as thinkers, speakers, and doers. In particular, Anderson described three roles for students that involve the productive use of language: child as storyteller, child as arguer, and child as explainer.

As Kate Frankel reflected on the future of comprehension, she similarly emphasized the importance of continuing to theorize comprehension as a complicated and agential endeavor, noting that reading is about “who you are, who you want to become.” In her own work, adolescent students describe reading as closely connected to interest, enjoyment, and passion and foreground the importance of coming to their own conclusions. She invited literacy educators to build on the generative frameworks offered by Pearson and colleagues, which “[insist] that the processes of reading, writing, and thinking are inherently messy, complex, and ongoing.”

Embracing Complex Views of Readers, Texts, and Contexts

Ian Wilkinson and Hillary Libnoch used several frameworks from Pearson’s writing to analyze key literacy education journals with an eye to where the field is headed next. The results of their analysis suggested that the field is likely to focus less on reader factors in the coming years, with the possible exception of executive functioning, and less on text factors, with the exception of text complexity. The field is likely to turn toward contextual factors that shape comprehension and comprehension instruction. Our understandings about task and context are expanding, as is the need to deal with more factors related to complex tasks and contexts, including disciplinarity, diversity, multiple text comprehension, discussion, and dialogue. They also suggested that we will need to address challenging questions about what instruction should look like as we engage with increasingly complex tasks and contexts.

Sheila Valencia also suggested that the future of comprehension research and practice should involve a move away from static views of readers or texts. Although the Common Core State Standards have pushed texts to the center, the focus is shifting back toward a more dynamic view of reader–text–task interactions and how we prepare readers to engage with complex ideas and texts in the interest of involvement in meaningful activity. Valencia discussed a recent paper (Valencia, Wixson, & Pearson, 2014) that used National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) assessments and performances to examine the features of texts and tasks that interact to create comprehension, including the abstractness of the concepts and the nature of the comprehension question. Valencia described several challenges that lie ahead, including better understanding text–task relationships; capturing these dynamic relationships in reading comprehension assessments; and uncovering the features of meaningful, engaging, actionable, personally relevant tasks that promote kids to use text in meaningful ways.

Supporting Teachers in the Ocean of Reforms

In looking ahead at teacher learning and school reform efforts, Sarah Woulfin described areas for future research. For example, she suggested that more research is needed on the role of teacher collaboration in supporting teacher learning about comprehension and shifts in instructional practice and on the preparation of teachers and leaders for involvement in reform efforts. Woulfin also called for exploring how research and student data can be used to advance improvement efforts, including those aimed at cultural responsiveness in comprehension instruction. Moreover, Woulfin suggested that leaders have a huge responsibility for streamlining initiatives in the current “reform soup” of teacher evaluation, standards, shifting instructional priorities, and the mass of information—online and elsewhere—about effective instruction. She called on literacy researchers to engage in research–practice partnerships around these pressing issues.

Pearson’s Impact: Seeding the Future

Pearson’s research on reading instruction, assessment, and policy has deeply influenced our collective knowledge about reading comprehension, having led to many advances such as those described in this article. Pearson has also influenced practice through his authoring of numerous curriculum programs and through the origination or dissemination of such ubiquitous theoretical and practical frameworks as schema theory, the Gradual Release of Responsibility model, and comprehension strategy instruction. Pearson’s scholarship is visionary and activist in ways that have continually pushed the field of reading education in productive and increasingly sophisticated directions. The orientations he advanced—toward more agential, contextual, and complex notions of reading comprehension and comprehension instruction—are only partially realized in current research and practice, but they provide important foundations for the work ahead. An archive of the presentations and work of Pearson can be found at http://festschrift.pdavidpearson.org.