Notes

Key Points
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Improving adolescent reading comprehension will require a concerted effort from researchers, educators, and policy makers to forgo short-term gains on measures that tap low-level comprehension for long-term solutions that take years to develop.
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An early and sustained focus on developing background knowledge, vocabulary, inference, and comprehension monitoring skills is necessary to improve reading comprehension across grade levels.
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Despite decades of reading comprehension research, a limited amount of time is spent using evidence-based methods in classrooms.
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Education leaders will need to strengthen teacher preparation programs and professional development to ensure teachers are prepared to use evidence-based practices to meet the literacy needs of their students.

Introduction
According to national and international tests of literacy, such as the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) and National Assessment of Educational Progress (National Assessment of Education Progress [NAEP]), students in the United States are unable to do relatively easy literacy tasks such as locate relevant information to determine the main idea of a text or make simple inferences (Kastberg, Chan, & Murray, 2016; National Center for Education Statistics, 2017). According to the most recent PISA, U.S. adolescents rank 15th in literacy skills. Results showed that 19% of the 15-year-olds tested scored below a Level 2 (of 6) indicating they had difficulty with tasks such as locating explicitly stated information, recognizing main ideas, and making low-level inferences in a familiar topic. Only 10% of U.S. students achieved a Level 5 indicating that they could organize several pieces of deeply embedded information, and engage in reflective, evaluative, and interpretative tasks in unfamiliar topics. Similarly, the NAEP scores showed that 64% of eighth grade students read at or below a basic level. Unfortunately, these scores have remained relatively flat for many years and have led many educators, researchers, and policy makers to question how well students are being prepared for a job market that increasingly requires self-learning, analytical skills, and transferable knowledge (e.g., Goldman & Pellegrino, 2015).
In this article, we briefly review the theoretical and empirical research in comprehension and consider the reasons for stagnant scores in reading comprehension in the United States. In the first part of the article, we explore different theoretical models for comprehension and then focus on malleable factors that have been shown to be important to comprehension. We conclude with possible solutions for translating research to practice and policies for improving reading comprehension instruction.

Effective Reading Comprehension Instruction
Many linguistic abilities, cognitive processes, and knowledge sources undergird comprehension ability complicating which comprehension components instruction should target (Perfetti & Adlof, 2012). To identify which components are worth measuring, some components serve as “pressure points” that, if changed, would significantly impact students’ comprehension ability. Such components should be integral to reading comprehension, vary across individuals, and represent malleable instructional targets (Perfetti & Adlof, 2012). With this in mind, we briefly review four components of reading comprehension (i.e., inference, knowledge, vocabulary, comprehension monitoring) that play prominent roles across theories of reading comprehension, are integral for understanding text, and represent potentially malleable targets for instruction. This review focuses on higher order comprehension skills but acknowledges the foundational role that efficient word recognition plays in reading comprehension (see Perfetti & Stafura, 2014).

Reading Comprehension: The Simple View of Reading (SVR)
There is considerable practical interest in understanding the component skills underlying reading comprehension; multiple theoretical models have been proposed that demonstrate varying levels of support in empirical literature. Among the most prominent, the SVR (Gough & Tunmer, 1986) posits that reading comprehension is the product of decoding and linguistic comprehension. The SVR has proven to be a robust, influential model for understanding the component skills underlying reading comprehension, and empirical studies have consistently found that it explains a significant degree of variance in reading comprehension across different ages and measures (e.g., Adlof et al., 2006; Foorman et al., 2015). However, there is also growing recognition that the SVR provides a limited framework for designing multicomponent reading interventions targeting component reading skills (Catts, 2018; Compton et al., 2014). The key aspect of the explanatory elegance of the SVR—its “simplicity”—presents a challenge in developing comprehensive theories of change that are responsive to the complexity of the comprehension task and might guide development for interventions for struggling students in Grades 3+. The critical challenge is to unpack the subcomponents of linguistic comprehension and identify those component skills (e.g., content knowledge) that may be malleable and targeted through intervention (Catts, 2018).