Understanding and improving reading comprehension skills: An individual-differences perspective

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My research program is concerned with developing ways to measure, understand, and improve reading comprehension skills. An assumption underlying my approach is that there are two major determinants of reading comprehension: the text and the reader. My research focuses primarily on the contributions of the reader, and how characteristics of the reader interact with characteristics of the text to influence reading success. My early individual-differences research focused almost exclusively on developing a measure of the reader's working memory capacity and establishing that it is a very good predictor of reading comprehension. My more recent working memory research has focused on why working memory capacity is not a perfect predictor. One reason appears to be that some readers are able to compensate for their low working memory capacities if they happen to have mature metacognitive awareness about the complexity of knowledge and the importance of integration to learning. My new research will explore when and how this compensation might occur, and whether these compensatory strategies can be taught to low span readers who do not have mature metacognitive awareness. My new research will also explore the role of spatial working memory in reading success; in particular, I will explore whether long-term retention of text material is influenced by the reader's ability to retain memory for the spatial location of that material. In 2001, my graduate student and I developed and validated a new tool that provides estimates of a reader's ability to activate and integrate long-term memory knowledge with text information, to make text-based inferences, and to recall text. We plan to use this tool to explore the cognitive and memory processes tapped by a variety of verbal reasoning and even nonverbal problem solving tasks. My individual-differences research has important educational and real-world applications.