The Effectiveness of Reading Comprehension Strategies in High School Science Classrooms

Abstract

Reading strategies have been shown to increase comprehension for younger learners. As students move to middle and high school, there is little opportunity to learn about, practice, and apply these strategies in classes, particularly in the content domains like science. Nonetheless, there is a growing national consensus that high school content area teachers need to better integrate discipline-specific reading supports throughout the curriculum. We evaluate the effectiveness of an effort to integrate reading comprehension strategies in biology classrooms. Students' independent proficiency with the strategies predicted science achievement, even when controlling for prior reading achievement. These results provide evidence that strategies are effective and practical in intact science classrooms. We discuss the implications of the findings for the design of content-area literacy instruction. Finally, we describe our efforts to refine the design of the strategy supports based on the empirical results.