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Although many contentious issues still plague the field of reading, most scholars would agree on this particular topic: Reading comprehension is critically important to the development of children's reading skills. Comprehension entails the understanding of written text, a process in which information from the text and the knowledge possessed by the reader act together to produce meaning (Anderson, Hiebert, Scott, & Wilkinson, 1985). In this respect, the text is not so much a vessel containing meaning as a source of partial information that enables the reader to use already-possessed knowledge to determine an intended meaning.
In fact, one could argue that there has emerged a rare consensus among researchers on how comprehension works (National Reading Panel Report, 2000). Rather than a set of isolated skills, reading is a complex, active process of constructing meaning. In addition to gaining information from the letters and words in a text, reading involves selecting and using knowledge about people, places, and things, and knowledge about texts and their organization. It is interactive, strategic, and adaptive, involving not just the reader, but the context, the purpose, and the different types of text and how they are used for different kinds of reading (Dole, Duffy, Roehler, & Pearson, 1991). In short, good readers skillfully integrate new information in the text with what they already know to produce meaning.
If this sounds like a rather exotic recipe, you are not alone. Boil it down, and this is what you get: Comprehension is about bringing what you already know to what you may want to learn. And the antecedent for whether you are selective, strategic, and interactive in monitoring your comprehension is a widely acknowledged but often overlooked factor: knowledge.
Not entirely overlooked, however. Starting with the National Commission on Reading's report, Becoming a Nation of Readers (Anderson et al., 1985), and continuing with the National Reading Panel report (2000) and other National Academy updates (Snow, Burns, & Griffin, 1998; Bransford, Brown, & Cocking, 2000), background knowledge has always been in the mix in concocting this elixir. Students have been encouraged to "activate" their background knowledge when reading a text. But just in case you do not have any knowledge on the topic to activate, there are other remedies as well. The National...