The Impact of Collaborative Strategic Reading on the Reading Comprehension of Grade 5 Students in Linguistically Diverse Schools

Recent findings from an expert panel of reading researchers noted that approximately 8 million adolescents struggle with literacy in middle and high school (Biancarosa and Snow 2006); the \“most common problem is that they are not able to comprehend what they read\” (p. 3). Before the 1980s, teachers rarely taught reading comprehension (Carlisle and Rice 2002; Durkin 1978). However, over the last 20 years, a large body of research emerged on methods for explicitly teaching reading comprehension to students in the upper elementary grades (Carlisle and Rice 2002). The goal is to teach students to learn from text-to discern which information is critical, integrate such information with what is already known, and draw valid inferences.