Vocabulary and comprehension strategy interventions have demonstrated that readers can improve these skills, which relates to comprehension gains on material of related content. The SEM (Study 2) suggests that readers who have high reader-based standards of coherence use more reading comprehension strategies and have more reading experience, which is associated with greater vocabulary knowledge. In an effort toward implementing reading comprehension interventions that not only train specific skills but equip students to continue to develop these skills independently, future interventions should focus on ways of increasing reader-based standards of coherence.
One avenue to improve readers’ standards of coherence is via increasing their motivation and engagement during reading. Research from the motivation literature demonstrated that students with mastery goals, i.e., goals to increase performance and ability in a specified domain (Ames & Archer, 1988), were more likely to continue pursuing that activity in the future (Harackiewicz, Barron, Tauer, Carter, & Elliot, 2000). Furthermore, college readers with high intrinsic motivation were more likely to remember more text elements (Ryan, Connell, & Plant, 1990).
In interventions with children that focus on reading strategies and reading motivation, readers with increased motivation had higher reading comprehension outcomes (e.g., Wigfield & Gutrie, 1997; Wigfield et al., 2008) and readers who found utility in what they read were more likely to have greater comprehension than those who did not (McWhaw & Abrami, 2001). In a 12- week intervention on comprehension strategies and reading engagement, Wigfield et al. (2008) found that fourth grade readers who received training for reading motivation strategies along with comprehension strategies reported higher reading engagement at the end of the intervention. The motivation component included providing students with content goals, giving students autonomy, hands-on activities, using interesting texts during instruction, and collaboration activities. The comprehension strategies component included activating relevant background knowledge, summarizing, questioning, organizing graphically, and identifying story structures. Readers who received both types of training performed better on standardized and experimenter-generated tests than those who received only comprehension strategy training. Importantly, reading engagement mediated the effect of the motivation and comprehension strategies intervention; readers who experienced greater increases in reading engagement showed greater gains on reading comprehension measures.
When readers are engaged, they may set higher standards of coherence and seek out more reading experiences on their own. The SEM results suggest that these increased reading experiences are related to higher vocabulary knowledge, which influences reading comprehension. Of note, more reading experience may not always result in reading comprehension gains. A review of reading comprehension interventions by the National Reading Panel (2000) indicated that interventions on sustained silent reading, a practice often employed in schools, have produced little support that simply reading more results in reading comprehension gains. During sustained silent reading, children often engage in unguided reading for a specified amount of time, with little to no discussion or comprehension questions about what they read. Many of these interventions did not closely monitor whether children actually engaged in silent reading or if their overall reading experiences changed, making it difficult to accurately assess the influence of readers’ silent reading experiences on reading comprehension (National Reading Panel).
Although more controlled experiments on silent reading need to be conducted, research indicates that supplying readers with relevant, meaningful reading prompts may promote engagement (National Reading Council, 2012). In recognizing the importance relevant reading situations, Sabatini, O’Reilly, Halderman, and Bruce (2014) created a standardized reading assessment for children called the global, integrated scenario-based assessment that provides students with real-world scenarios, such as looking up information to create a website about farming. Providing readers with effective reading experiences that promote deep levels of understanding may be beneficial for vocabulary and comprehension gains. Integrating standards of coherence with reading is one way to create effective reading experiences. Higher standards may result in close reading of texts, which is associated with extracting meaning beyond what is explicitly written (Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC);
2011). Close reading involves the use of background knowledge and knowledge about text structures to come to multiple implicit meanings of a text. During close reading, readers find evidence for a particular interpretation of the text and evaluate the strength of that evidence through their own understanding, the wording of the text, and what they believe the author is trying to convey (Boyles & Scherer, 2012; Fisher & Frey, 2012; PAARC, 2011). Only at high standards of coherence can readers employ such deep reading processes.
Based on findings from the present study along with findings from previous reading comprehension interventions (mostly with children), it may be beneficial for future reading comprehension interventions with adults to integrate skill instruction with ways to increase reader- based standards of coherence. Evidence suggests that adult readers can learn new words from context (e.g., Bolger et al., 2008); however, more reading experience alone may not result in vocabulary gains (National Reading Panel, 2000). Readers should be motivated to learn from what they read, setting high standards of coherence that allow for deep, close reading during reading experiences. Finally, although the SEM (Study 2) did not include all possible individual difference measures, such as working memory or general intelligence, it provided a view of the unique interrelationships among reading-related skills and reader-based standards of coherence.