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Improving work. Improving lives. Reading for Understanding J ust because children can decipher words on a page doesn’t mean they understand them. Although they are, technically, able to read, they may fail to grasp the text’s meaning. Because reading comprehension is integral to learning any sub- ject, such students may falter, even fail, across the board academically. Getting children over that bridge from reading to understanding is the goal of a large-scale effort now underway at the Florida Center for Reading Research (FCRR), part of Florida State University’s Learning Systems Institute. FCRR is playing a leading role in a nationwide drive to help students better understand what they read. With a $20 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences, FCRR has launched a dozen in-depth studies focused on developing tools, curricula and strategies to help teachers teach their students. The effort is part of five-year, $100 million initiative, dubbed Reading for Understanding, that involves 130 researchers from an array of institutions across the country examining reading comprehension from pre-K through high school. At FCRR, an interdisciplinary group of experts is focusing on the pre-K to fifth grade portion of this pedagogical puzzle. In addition to conducting basic research in higher-poverty schools across North Florida, the team is developing instructional activities and professional development to make it easier for teachers to put the study’s findings into practice in the classroom. In the project’s first year (2010-2011), researchers are conducting both basic research and a number of intervention studies that develop and test ways to improve reading for comprehension. The basic research studies are designed to identify component skills and abilities that lead to students’ success or failure reading for understanding. One study, for example, is assessing children from pre-K through fifth grade on everything from basic attention and working memory to decoding and language comprehension. Another study, using state-of-the-art eye tracking computers, examines how children examine words as they read. The basic studies conducted during the project’s first year will help the researchers iden- tify new interventions that will be developed in subsequent years. THE FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY LEARNING SYSTEMS INSTITUTE Research and development for Pre-K to 5th grade students’ comprehension Intervention Studies Dialect Awareness The goal of this study is to improve reading comprehension for students who speak non-standard English at home. One group of students is taught to contrast home (dialect) and school (standard) grammar features. Another group is taught how to edit
