Chapter 53

Strategies for Developing a Research Program on Reading Comprehension
Written by: RAND Reading Study Group

In this report, the RAND Reading Study Group addresses the importance of contemplating current and future research methods. These crucial reflections must also include other important issues such as funding levels and funding sources and collaboration among various potential funding agencies.

The RAND Reading Study Group (RRSG) reports on four prerequisites for establishing successful and effective reading comprehension research programs. The four prerequisites are establishing priorities, building on strengths, improving the status of education research and choosing methods appropriate to the task.

Establishing priorities: Research programs should be judged by not only on the methods that are being used, but also on how the methods of the program are making improvements with classroom practice, curricula, teacher preparation and on how it provides additional informative assessments to provide data for the research.

Criteria-The high priority focus should be on research on instruction, on teacher preparation and on assessment.
Tensions- There is many tensions within establishing priorities. They include: tension between focusing on a specific age range versus a wider range; tension between priorities derived from our analysis of research and practice and priorities determined by other factors such as political influences; tension between research that is well embedded in existing knowledge and theory and research that is truly innovative; tension between immediate payoff and longer-term research efforts; and tension between preplanned and emergent research priorities.

Building on Strengths: The past 25 years of research has enhanced reading instruction in primary grades in the United States. The primary focus of past research has been on understanding the development of word reading and using this understanding to develop interventions for students that have difficulty with word reading. The RRSG states that a focus on reading comprehension is now in order. By providing instruction in vocabulary, oral language production, writing, text analysis and other important factors that lead to reading comprehension, researchers will be providing valuable tools to assist students with in depth reading comprehension.

Improving the Status of Educational Research: Even before addressing the next crucial steps for future research, The RRSG suggests educational research programs must first address growing doubts with the quality, relevance and usefulness of current research. The following three areas need to be addressed when developing new research.

Ensure programmatic efforts- Changes need to be based on well-replicated findings consistent with broader theoretical understandings instead of the results of a single study or fancy new idea.

Develop a community of researchers-Linguistic, sociolinguistics, discourse processing, anthropology, psychology, and cognitive scientists as well as other distinct field members need to work together, collaboratively forming a community of reading researchers linked by their common intellectual focus.

Make both research-and practice-based knowledge optimally usable for all-Work on current reading practices need to be shared at all levels in such places as journals and research proposals so that knowledge is sufficiently incorporated in the classroom as soon as possible. Mechanisms for distinguishing excellent from mediocre practice should also be implemented.

Methods Appropriate to the Task-Methods that have proven useful to advancing educational research are 1. experimental and quasi-experimental designs; 2. structural equation modeling; 3. hierarchical linear modeling; 4. meta-analysis in experimental research; 5. discourse analysis; 6. video analysis; 7. classroom observational analysis; 8. verbal protocol analysis.

Direct, explicit strategy instruction has been proven to show promising results in studies.

SEM-Structural equation modeling-when investigators examine concealed variables to get valid and reliable measures of instructional variables to measure classroom constructs, student characteristics, and student achievement outcomes.

HLM-Hierarchical linear modeling- when investigators eliminate variance in achievement attributable to unwanted sources. When working with large data sets, or with quasi-experimental designs, variance in outcome variables that are not experimentally controlled can be statistically removed from the classroom instructional effects that are of theoretical importance (pg. 1562).

Both SEM and HLM allow investigators for develop growth variables reflecting the slope and curvature of student improvement in reading comprehension or other things such as reading motivation or content knowledge gleaned while reading.

Methodologies overlap to a large extent, there is not intrinsic ranking of values, high levels of rigor can be defined for any form of disciplined inquiry and methodologies can be assessed only with reference to the research questions they are being used to answer, so it is not always possible to make clear-cut divisions across types of methodologies.

The Research Infrastructure: Organizing for Programmatic Research or Reading Comprehension-Procedures for getting from here to there also need to be put into place. Decisions on how Requests for Applications (RFAs) will be researched and written, who should serve on review panels, and how the accumulation of research findings will be monitored to serve as input need to be investigated. The following list indicates ways in which the organizational structure of education research funding needs to go.

1. Leadership and professionalism for long-term planning. A. A director should be named to oversee this initiative and related reading projects. B. the director should interact and collaborate with individuals across the various federal research organizations involved. C. the director should interact with the field, help with developing proposals, and help synthesize the knowledge base that will emanate from this and other federally sponsored reading research initiatives. D. the director should not be responsible for review.

2. Coordination-coordination between various federal agencies needs to take place. Currently funding for R & D activities for reading comprehension is lacking among federal agencies that support educational research.

3. Sustainability-continual, long-term support and funding needs to be applied for reading comprehension research. Funding needs to cut across administrations and political constituencies. Some specific steps can be taken to assure this happens.

A. Regular syntheses- Procedures for accumulating, reviewing and synthesizing knowledge developed through funded research could be built into a funding effort.

B. Talent development- The design of a research training fellowship and developmental grant programs for initial investigators, should be put into place.

C. Coordinated solicitations- Long-term plans that provide a mix of short-term, medium-term and long-term goals should be established with a reading comprehension agenda. Various grants should be supported.

D. Development- The development of curricula, software, and instructional programs based on the research needs to happen.

E. Sufficient funding- A significantly greater level of funding is needed than is currently available for reading comprehension research. To improve comprehension, a systematic, research-based way will demand a substantial increase in basic knowledge about the reading comprehension processes and large-scale efforts to implement and evaluate improved instructional, teacher preparation, and professional development programs needs to happen.

Final note: Currently the U.S. government invests between 2% and 3% of all national expenditures to R & D. Only 0.3% of the money focuses on K-12 education!