The plan of the research will be to set forth the context in which reading comprehension could become an issue and then to discuss strategies for assessing comprehension levels with a view toward forecasting possible strategies for addressing the complaint in a useful way.
To complain about one's inability to comprehend and retain what one reads is to make a social and probably an economic statement. As Lerner (p. 397) says of children with reading disabilities, "poor reading leads to many other types of problems," including difficulties with educational and employment opportunities. Perhaps even more critical is the potential for being virtually cut out of the high-technology information age, which may be abundant in visual/graphic cues but which requires reading skills, whether for decoding computer-operating instructions, exploiting the content of what Lerner calls "nonprint media," or as an instrument of social integration with the competent-reader population. Special disadvantages of poor reading comprehension can be inferred from the inability to read appliance, emergency-preparedness, or medical-prescription instructions.
But realizing the social need for reading skills in general is not the same as identifying good or poor skill levels in particular. One issue in this regard, as Lerner points out (p. 416), is the importance of what the reader brings to the written material. Prior knowledge of a subject matter or of the world in general, language literacy, and general ability to connect reading to the thinking process are all important. The Goodman model cites "constraints set up through prior choices, language knowledge, his [reader's] cognitive styles, and strategies he has learned" (Outline, p. 3) as relevant to models of reading. Whether these factors can be identified is another matter, however. Weaver's (1990) analysis of testing methods points toward the difficulty of obtaining accurate information about reading co...