We Ask Students What they Understand, Not How they Understand: Making Reasoning Comprehension Processes Visible and Explicit

Abstract This paper pushes beyond current debates over what is being called the science of reading to articulate a multidimensional complex conception of what is entailed in reading comprehension. Reading comprehension entails not only cognitive processes, but equally important is how issues of identity along multiple dimensions, perceptions of tasks and settings, social and emotional relationships intersect to shape effort and motivation to comprehend. The paper argues that a central problem in the typical teaching of reading comprehension in the K–12 sector is insufficient attention to processes or meaning making. Typical instruction focuses on the outcomes of comprehension, but not on how readers can/should go about trying to make sense of texts. Such instruction can be created by communities of teachers who examine the sources of text difficulty in texts they are teaching. The paper offers explicit criteria for evaluating sources of text complexity in informational and literary texts, and in so doing push beyond the boundaries of traditional Lexile scores.