Improving Adolescent Comprehension:
Developing Comprehension Strategies
in the Content Areas
Mark W. Conley
MichiganStateUniversity
To appear in Handbook of Research on Reading Comprehension, Edited by Susan E. Israel and Gerald G. Duffy. New York: Erlbaum.
Improving Adolescent Comprehension: Developing Learning Strategies in Content Areas
The field of adolescent literacy is engaged in a continual struggle with what it means to promote comprehension. Starting out as content area reading, the field was preoccupied with developing teaching activities for learning from texts. For nearly 20 years, from the early 1960’s until the early 1990’s, proponents of content area reading, and then content area literacy, recognizing the integrated roles of reading, writing, speaking and listening (McKenna & Robinson, 1990), churned out one teaching activity after another for fostering comprehension. The names of these activities are ubiquitous – semantic maps and graphic organizers, anticipation guides, three-level guides, journaling, I-searches and the list goes on and on. A compendium of these activities is in its sixth edition (Tierney & Readance, 2004).
In the 1990’s, the field turned its attention to adolescents. In an article documenting the shift, Lisa Patel Stevens argues for a reconceptualization of the field to include out of school literacies (Stevens, 2002). Critical of school-based approaches to comprehension, which, according to Stevens, focus on factual comprehension of texts, she promotes adolescent multiple literacies. This reframing poses a fundamental shift in views of comprehension to include the interaction of the learner, texts, contexts and culture. In short, comprehension is no longer the oversimplified application of a teaching activity or task to a text, it is an ecological event characterized by the complexities of an “enactment of self” and the “interplay of multiple texts.” (Moje et al., 2000).
Despite these huge ideological and empirical swings – at one time for teaching activity and task and then toward a celebration of the adolescent – an important point is repeatedly ignored: comprehension, especially in the content areas, is about learning and, often, doing (Conley, 2007). Thorndike long ago recognized a very active and strategic role for readers and comprehension, including sorting and sifting, regarding some ideas as tentative and others as important, and organizing comprehension for some greater purpose, such as problem solving or communicating (Thorndike, 1917). Pressley and his colleagues have reinforced and elaborated this view with comprehension strategies as the engine that drives comprehension (Block et al., 2002; Pressley, 2000, 2006; Pressley & Hilden, 2006). Comprehension strategies are goal oriented processes that readers and writers use to construct meaning. What we know about comprehension strategies and comprehension comes mostly from studies of skilled reading (Pressley, 2006; Pressley & Afflerbach, 1995; Wyatt et al., 1993) and from studies of children who experience difficulties with reading (Cain & Oakhill, 2004). The message from this research is unequivocal: skilled readers know how to select and apply comprehension strategies where and when they need them to comprehend; struggling readers experience difficulties with comprehension because they know little about comprehension strategies or how to use them.
Research in content area literacy/adolescent literacy has rarely, if ever, addressed comprehension strategies, despite our growing understanding of their importance. Some critics of content area literacy have suggested that the research is overly restricted in its focus solely on teaching activities, tasks and text meanings, leaving the role of the reader out entirely (Moje et al., 2000). Adolescent literacy celebrates the uniqueness of adolescence combined with the potential of multiple literacies, yet leaves out any mention of comprehension strategies as a possible approach toward empowering adolescents (Conley, 2007). These omissions are important since both research perspectives – content area literacy and adolescent literacy – could benefit by considering the link between learning strategies and comprehension. For content area literacy, comprehension strategies provide a purpose for instruction – to teach students, for example, how to activate prior knowledge, summarize and question, and organize information for recall and/or writing. For adolescent literacy, comprehension strategies provide yet another form of literacy for constructing meaning within in-school and out-of-school contexts.
The purpose of this chapter is to explore comprehension strategies as a powerful foundation for adolescent comprehension in the content areas. Previous research on comprehension strategies has been limited by its focus on younger readers and writers with only very simple tasks, such as memory and recall (Pressley & Hilden, 2006). Much less is known about the potential for comprehension strategies that adolescents can employ to engage complex texts and tasks in the content areas. This chapter explores the potential for developing adolescents’ understanding of comprehension strategies in the content areas.
The Failure to Connect Teaching, Learning and Adolescents
Historically, content area reading was designed to “develop students’ reading-to-learn strategies,” including locating, comprehending, remembering and retrieving information (Moore et al., 1983). A second stated purpose was to assist students in developing “reading-to-do” strategies, which include all of the tasks that accompany content area-specific work, such as “completing lab experiments, assembling mechanical devices and following recipes.” The original notions of content area reading placed students at the center of instruction, with the goal of helping students develop understandings of reading strategies highly correlated with achievement in the content areas (Moore et al., 1983). Moore, Readance and Rickelman’s historical review pointed to methods textbooks devoted to content area reading as evidence of these views (Moore et al., 1983).
However, if we examine past or even current content area literacy textbooks, there is actually little, if any, evidence that content area literacy develops students’ reading-to-learn strategies or that students are necessarily at the center of instruction. Table 1 represents a recentanalysis of topics held in common among 8 popular methods textbooks in content area literacy (Alvermann & Phelps, 2002; Brozo & Simpson, 2006; McKenna & Robinson, 2001; Readance et al., 2001; Ruddell, 2007; Ryder & Graves, 1999; Unrau, 2003; Vacca & Vacca, 2004). To be sure, there are variations among the texts; some emphasize multiculturalism, English as a second language, technology or No Child Left Behind policy more or less than others and in different ways. Table 1 represents the topics found most often among the texts.
------Insert Table 1 about here ------
As the table illustrates, these textbooks mostly depict instructional activities, often referred to as teaching or instructional strategies, such as graphic organizers, directed reading thinking activities, questioning (as instruction), K-W-L, Guided Reading Procedure, and text structure and other kinds of reading guides. While some activities reference comprehension strategies that students might use, such as summarizing or questioning, the dominant representation within these textbooks is of teaching activities. Moreover, few methods texts deliberately connect teaching activities with the development of adolescents’ comprehension strategies, particularly with different kinds of students (more versus less able readers, for instance). Rather than making connections between teaching activities, learning strategies and different students, methods texts promote general teaching activities as serving the need only to develop knowledge in a content area. The texts do not demonstratehow teachers could use a graphic organizer or reading guide, for example, to help different students gain an understanding of how to activate prior knowledge or organize knowledge for later recall independently.
The research reviews for content area literacy and then adolescent literacy do not improve upon this picture, preferring to treat teaching activity and the development of comprehension strategies as distinct activities. Alvermann and Moore’s (1991) review draws a distinction between “teaching strategies” which are content focused and teacher-initiated and “comprehension strategies” which are student directed and intended for building independence in reading and studying (Alvermann & Moore, 1991). Teaching strategies identified and reviewed include study guides, adjunct questions, graphic organizers, advance organizers, using text structure and comprehending main ideas. Comprehension strategies include rehearsal (underlining, taking verbatim notes), elaborating (taking notes through paraphrasing), organizing (mapping) and comprehension monitoring (think-alouds, self-questioning). In Moore and Alvermann’s review, teaching strategies and comprehension strategies are evaluated separately with regard to their efficacy with varying abilities of students and their comprehension. The review found that students who benefit the most from teaching strategies tend to be more able readers. An intriguing but untested hypothesis within this research is that more able readers are able to take greater advantage of teaching strategies compared with less able readers because more able readers already understand and know how to apply comprehension strategies. To the extent that teaching is recognized as a factor in developing comprehension strategies, Moore and Alvermann do acknowledge that comprehension strategies are best taught through direct instruction, explanation and modeling. Yet, none of the familiar content area reading teaching activities (maps, guides etc.) is implicated for their effectiveness in promoting comprehension strategies. Again, as with Moore, Readance and Rickelman’s (1983) historical review, no connections are made between teachers’ specific use of teaching strategies and students’ development of comprehension strategies.
Bean’s (2000) review reminds the field that students are at the center of literacy instruction, focusing on developing “reading and writing skill necessary to read, comprehend and react to appropriate instructional materials in a given subject area.” (Bean, 2000). Coming 17 years after Moore, Readance and Rickelman’s (1983) historical review, Bean reasserts that the students are central to the process of engaging with texts. Bean adds yet another twist by claiming that social contexts shape comprehension, including the content areas and out of school contexts. An implication of Bean’s critique is that all of the previous work on teaching strategies and comprehension strategies needs to be reconsidered with regard to features of different social contexts, including the complexity of beliefs and practices within different disciplines and among teachers, variations in genre and task within and across content areas and differences in students’ cultures, capabilities language, aspirations and knowledge.
As expansive as this conceptualization is in comparison with previous research and reviews focusing on teaching activities and comprehension strategies, Bean’s contextual perspective does not provide explicit connections between teaching and learning. While students are placed definitively at the center of socially constructed meaning making, Bean does not explain how learning could or should happen. As a result, just as much as the more cognitive-oriented views of the past do not connect teaching strategies and comprehension strategies, the social constructivist approach highlights adolescents’ social milieu without providing insight about what teachers could or should do to help them (teaching strategies) or what students could or should do to help themselves (comprehension strategies). This ongoing omission – connecting teaching, learning and adolescents - is responsible for severely limiting what the fields of content area literacy/adolescent literacy can recommend with regard to improving adolescent comprehension.
Seeking Balance with Third Space
Moje et al.’s (2004) work with third space represents a groundbreaking attempt to return students to the center of comprehension, as envisioned by Bean, while connecting with the more cognitive point of view of strategies, promoted by Alvermann and Moore. One could argue that Moje’s work finally delivers on Moore, Readance and Rickelman’s promise of placing adolescents at the center while teaching them how to comprehend.
Moje’s notion of third space involves finding ways to build bridges between everyday knowledge and discourses (ways of reading, writing and talking) and conventional academic knowledge and discourses. In comparison with earlier accounts, Moje acknowledges a much richer view of students’ knowledge and discourse based on students’ experiences with parents’ work outside the home, work in the home, travel across countries and engagement with environmental and health issues. Her assumption is that classroom teaching and learning often ignores the students’ funds of knowledge and perspectives from home, peer groups and other networks of relationships.
Given the history of content area literacy and adolescent literacy research, it is relatively easy to see how students’ knowledge, discourses and learning needs might be overlooked. If texts and text-driven teaching activities are the critical variables, dominating teachers’ and their students’ attention, as Alvermann and Moore claim, students’ knowledge and literacies are often left out. If adolescents’ multiple literacies are most important, the need for new literacy learning can be overlooked. Moje avoids both of these pitfalls by arguing that it is not enough just to celebrate what adolescents know and can currently do. They also need to become connected to conventional academic texts and discourses as a way of entry into disciplinary communities (such as mathematics and science) and the workplace.
But the story does not end here. It is not just about texts and tasks. Moje argues that teachers must find ways to help adolescents use their sometimes marginalized knowledge and ways of reading, writing and talking to engage themselves in conventional academic comprehension and learning. Moje documents how a science teacher teaching about the water quality fails to build on students’ experiences with their families, including water pollution in the local community and community activism to address the problem. She also notes how students rarely volunteer what they know from home and family, because they do not see how the concepts under study are important to their lives, nor do they feel that the teacher will acknowledge what they know.
Adopting Moje’s view means recognizing a much more complex picture of comprehension than depicted in the past research. In fact, it is not entirely clear what comprehension instruction might look like from a perspective balanced delicately between students’ knowledge and literacies and academic texts and discourse. Moje offers several principles that might characterize comprehension instruction that bridges the home and the academic. For example, it is clear that teachers need to welcome different kinds of knowledge and discourses in the classroom. And comprehending academic texts and engaging in discourses about them requires knowing the structure, concepts, principles and discourses of a content area. What is less clear is how peer experiences, knowledge and discourses can be brought in alongside academic knowledge and discourses to develop students’ capacity in the content areas. For instance, peer activities around music and popular culture equip students for critical analyses of texts. But how can teachers rally adolescents’ critical discourses to critique classroom texts?
The view of teaching activities and strategies o prevalent in the research and reviews within content area literacy and adolescent literacy may not be adequate for the kind of bridging Moje describes. As Moje correctly notes, many teaching activities and comprehension strategies can be practiced in ways that are disconnected from the students or the disciplines in which they are used. There is often the assumption that infusing generic teaching and/or learning strategies into the disciplines is the key for developing content area or adolescent literacy. When the infusion doesn’t “take” and teachers and students complain, the teachers are labeled “resistors” (Stewart & O'Brien, 1989). An alternative view might be that the teaching activities or comprehension strategies have not been carefully considered with regard to the disciplinary context – the structure, concepts and principles of the content area or the knowledge and discourses that students bring with them. In a complicated disciplinary context where, as Moje suggests, students have significant knowledge and discourses to apply yet fail to speak up about it, the teachers fail to invite and recognize students’ knowledge, and the disciplines present their own unique challenges with respect to knowledge, genre and structure, the response from the field has been astonishingly simple, bordering on irrelevant. The prevailing wisdom has been to give teachers and students graphic organizers and comprehension guides. As Moje’s research amply demonstrates, this prevailing wisdom is nowhere nearly enough and may even confuse an already complicated set of challenges for teachers and adolescents in the content areas.
Disciplinary Views of Comprehension Strategy Instruction
Yet another approach for adolescent comprehension is to consider disciplinary contexts –the content areas - and how learning strategies can be developed and applied appropriately. To a large extent, the content areas, including mathematics, science, social studies and English, have been considered by content area literacy and adolescent literacy as monolithic. That is to say, the notion that there are multiple educational traditions, sub-disciplines, multiple kinds of texts and tasks within sub-disciplines, and multiple views of students and classroom discourse has rarely if ever been acknowledged. For instance, there is little recognition that mathematics consists of the sub-disciplines of algebra, geometry, or trigonometry or that science consists of biology, chemistry and physics. There is no acknowledgement that disciplines like English are comprised of different educational traditions or perspectives, often in tension with one another (Applebee, 1997b). And there is little awareness that teaching social studies or history involve different assumptions about knowledge or pedagogy (Evans, 2006).