Learning and Instruction 21 (2011) 520e537

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Implementation and effects of explicit reading comprehension instruction

in fifth-grade classrooms
Rune Andreassen a, Ivar Bråten b,*
a
Østfold University College, Norway
b
Institute for Educational Research, University of Oslo, P.O. Box 1092, Blindern, N-0317 Oslo, Norway
Received 16 February 2010; revised 23 August 2010; accepted 30 August 2010

Abstract

In this intervention study, teachers tried to implement four instructional principles derived from the literature on research-based, explicit
reading comprehension instruction in their fifth-grade classrooms. The principles focused on relevant background knowledge, reading
comprehension strategies, reading-group organization, and reading motivation. Results indicated that during a five-month intervention period,
students in the intervention group increased their strategic competence and comprehension performance relative to controls. However, no effect
was found on reading motivation. The overall pattern of results is explained in relation to the implementation quality of the four instructional
principles, with implementation data indicating that the principles of reading-group organization and reading motivation were particularly
difficult for the teachers to translate into classroom practice.
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Keywords: Reading comprehension; Reading instruction; Reading strategies; Reading motivation

1. Introduction which is the mandatory framework for teaching and learning

The major purpose of this study was to investigate the effects
of explicit reading comprehension instruction on students’
strategy use, reading motivation, and comprehension perfor-
mance in relation to the quality of program implementation.
Although reading researchers have paid much attention to
comprehension instruction in recent years (Murphy, Wilkinson,
Soter, Hennessey, & Alexander, 2009; Pearson, 2009), elemen-
tary school teachers, in America as well as in Europe, still seem
unsure about how to teach reading comprehension and often test
rather than teach comprehension by just concentrating on asking
students questions about text content after reading (Liang & Dole,
2006; van Keer, 2005). This also characterizes the situation in
Norwegian schools, despite an explicit emphasis on the teaching
of reading comprehension strategies in the national curriculum,
* Corresponding author. Tel.: þ47 22 85 52 82; fax: þ47 22 85 42 50.
E-mail address: ivar.braten@ped.uio.no (I. Bråten).
goals in all classrooms (Norwegian Ministry of Education and
Research, 2006). Thus, reading instruction in Norwegian class-
rooms often involves reading aloud to children (Rasmussen,
2003), asking them control questions after reading (van Daal,
Solheim, Gabrielsen, & Begnum, 2007), and using IRE-
sequences (Anmarkrud, 2009; Klette, 2003) where teachers
initiate a discussion, students respond, and teachers evaluate their
responses (Cazden, 1988). At best, such activities could be
labelled implicit comprehension instruction (Dole, 2000). In
contrast, explicit comprehension instruction is focused on giving
students the procedural and conditional knowledge they need to
learn from text (Paris, Lipson, & Wixson, 1983), and it is
generally associated with direct instruction in comprehension
strategies (Pearson & Dole, 1987).
Presumably, strategies play a prominent role in compre-
hension because readers use them to construct coherent mental
representations and explanations of situations described in
texts (Graesser, 2007; Graesser, Singer, & Trabasso, 1994).
Building on the conceptualizations of strategies presented by

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doi:10.1016/j.learninstruc.2010.08.003
 R. Andreassen, I. Bråten / Learning and Instruction 21 (2011) 520e537
Alexander, Graham, and Harris (1998) and Weinstein and
Mayer (1986), we define reading comprehension strategies
as mental activities selected by the reader to acquire, organize,
and elaborate information, as well as to reflect on and guide
their own text comprehension (cf., Bråten & Samuelstuen,
2004). Because readers are assumed to use strategies in
order to reduce a perceived discrepancy between a desired
outcome and their current state of understanding, compre-
hension strategies are also regarded as deliberate and goal
oriented processes used to construct meaning from text (see
also, Afflerbach, Pearson, & Paris, 2008). In particular, the use
of deeper-level strategies such as predicting upcoming text
content, generating and answering questions, constructing
self-explanations and clarifications, capturing the gist of the
text, and monitoring comprehension seems to promote good
reading comprehension (McNamara, 2007; National Reading
Panel, 2000; Pressley & Harris, 2006). Such deeper-level
strategies typically involve drawing inferences based on prior
knowledge related to text content (Pressley, 2000).
Explicit instruction in comprehension strategies requires
that teachers move beyond a mere “content approach”,
encouraging students to attend to text ideas and build a mental
representation without considering specific mental processes,
and employ a “strategies approach”, where students’ mental
processes are directly targeted (McKeown, Beck, & Blake,
2009). In their attempt to explain the absence of explicit
instruction in comprehension strategies in American schools
despite the solid evidence of its effectiveness, El-Dinary,
Pressley, and Schuder (1992) argued that strategy instruction
may differ too much from the preconceptions teachers have
about skills instruction in reading. Because we believe that this
explanation may also have merit in the Norwegian educational
context, a main assumption in our intervention work has been
that considerable teacher preparation is needed before explicit
reading comprehension instruction can be successfully
implemented in classrooms.
1.1. Theoretical basis and prior research on explicit
reading comprehension instruction
The main theoretical basis for this investigation of reading
comprehension instruction was Guthrie and Wigfield’s (2000)
engagement model of the development of reading compre-
hension. According to this model, good reading comprehen-
sion is likely to follow from engaged reading, that is,
intrinsically motivated and strategic reading to build concep-
tual knowledge in collaboration with others. Thus, engaged
reading that, in turn, may promote achievement in reading
comprehension, is assumed to involve cognitive, social, and
motivational dimensions: “. engaged readers in the class-
room and elsewhere coordinate their strategies and knowledge
(cognition) within a community of literacy (social) in order to
fulfil their personal goals, desires, and intentions (motivation)”
(Guthrie & Wigfield, 2000, p. 404). Consequentially, the
engagement model implies that all three types of engagement
processes (i.e., cognitive, social, and motivational) should be
supported as part of good reading comprehension instruction.
521
During the past decades, many studies have demonstrated
that deeper-level comprehension strategies can be developed
through explicit teaching (Duffy, 2002). Moreover, positive
effects of such instruction on comprehension performance
have been found in a number of experimental and quasi-
experimental studies (Duke & Pearson, 2002; National
Reading Panel, 2000; Trabasso & Bouchard, 2002). Whereas
early intervention research usually focused on the effects of
teaching a single comprehension strategy, such as question
generation, mental imagery, or summarization, and more often
than not took place in laboratory settings and were managed
by researchers (Trabasso & Bouchard, 2002), the teaching of
multiple strategies has increasingly been investigated in the
last two decades, with natural classroom settings and real
teachers also replacing laboratories and researchers (Pressley,
Graham, & Harris, 2006). The idea is, of course, that more
comprehensive, multiple-strategies programs implemented in
classrooms by teachers may have a greater impact on reading
comprehension than brief laboratory-based interventions
administered by researchers that focus on a single strategy.
Moreover, comprehension strategies have been taught in
combination with other instructional components, most
notably with cooperative learning activities and group
discussions (Murphy et al., 2009; Slavin, Cheung, Groff, &
Lake, 2008). The rationale for the inclusion of social
components in reading comprehension instruction is largely
derived from sociocultural theory, such as the work of
Vygotsky (1978) and Rogoff (1990), implying that “peers can
function as tutors for one another as they learn how to interpret
text” (Almasi, 1996, p. 17). Emphasized are the role of the
learning community’s total background knowledge and the
negotiation of meaning between different readers’ multiple
interpretations of texts (Almasi, 1996; Pressley et al., 1992).
Among the best researched and best documented multiple-
strategy reading comprehension programs are Reciprocal
Teaching (RT; Palincsar & Brown, 1984), Transactional
Strategy Instruction (TSI; Pressley et al., 1992), and Concept-
Oriented Reading Instruction (CORI; Guthrie et al., 1996).
And, because the present intervention study was inspired by
those three programs, a brief description of each is in order
here.
Essentially, RT (Palincsar & Brown, 1984) involves the
explicit instruction of the four strategies of predicting, clari-
fying, questioning, and summarizing and organizes reading-
group dialogues to scaffold students’ strategy use. The
reciprocity of the interaction between the teacher and the
students and between the students themselves is emphasized as
they collaborate in small reading groups to co-construct good
text comprehension by means of the four strategies. Gradually,
group members are expected to take over responsibility by
acting as teachers and modeling strategy use for each other
and giving each other feedback. Expository texts related to
students’ social studies or science curricula are typically used
as reading materials in RT interventions (e.g., Lederer, 2000;
Takala, 2006). RT has been evaluated in quite a few studies,
and Rosenshine and Meister (1994), when reviewing this body
of research, found effect sizes to vary from small negative to
522 R. Andreassen, I. Bråten / Learning and Instruction 21 (2011) 520e537
large positive on reading comprehension measures, depending
on the type of comprehension measure, the type of control
group, and the exact instructional approach. Because imple-
mentation data have been essentially lacking, however,
differences in implementation quality were not discussed as
a possible explanation for the differing effect sizes. According
to Pressley et al. (2006), this highlights the need for imple-
mentation data to better explain why particular interventions
work (or do not work) relative to comparison conditions.
In relation to Palincsar and Brown’s (1984) foundational
work, TSI (Pressley et al., 1992) and CORI (Guthrie et al.,
1996) can be considered parts of an evolution towards more
long-term, extensive multiple-strategy reading comprehension
programs including several instructional components (Allen,
2003; Pressley et al., 2006). Thus, TSI is forged as long-
term comprehension instruction taking place in a natural set-
tingdbeing taught by trained teachers as part of their ordinary
classroom instruction related to content areas. TSI has resulted
in medium to large positive effects on comprehension
performance, with positive effects also observed on stan-
dardized reading tests (Pressley, 2006). In addition, a number
of instructional practices intended to promote reading moti-
vation and reading engagement feature prominently in CORI.
In that approach, students collaboratively read and discuss
interesting self-selected texts to increase their knowledge
about science topics and concepts introduced through hands-
on science activities. While quite large positive effects of
CORI on reading strategies and reading comprehension have
been found in several studies, there is also substantial effect
size variation across studies, especially with respect to reading
motivation (Guthrie, McRae, & Klauda, 2007). Such variation
is hard to explain, however, without implementation data that
can provide a window on what actually happens in classrooms
during an intervention, particularly on the extent to which the
different components of a complex intervention program are
really implemented.
1.2. What should explicit reading comprehension
instruction be the instruction of?
Our instructional framework, simply called Explicit
Reading Comprehension Instruction (ERCI), was based on
a careful review of the literature on the three multiple-strategy
programs mentioned above (i.e., RT, TSI, and CORI). That
review resulted in the extraction of four main principles
characterizing research-based, explicit comprehension
instruction, with these principles also consistent with the
engagement model of Guthrie and Wigfield (2000). We
intentionally chose the term instructional framework to
describe our intervention because it rested on a set of princi-
ples rather than a lesson-to-lesson manual, with these princi-
ples framing teachers’ later development of more complete
lessons for implementation (Liang & Dole, 2006). Thus, by
means of teacher - researcher cooperation prior to the inter-
vention, six Norwegian fifth-grade teachers were prepared to
implement the four principles in their classrooms during
a five-month period. How well they succeeded in their
implementation and what happened to students’ reading
strategy use, reading motivation, and reading comprehension
as a result of the implementation are addressed in this study.
The first principle, relevant background knowledge,
emphasizes that reading comprehension is a process where
readers actively construct text meaning by drawing on their
background knowledge. Activation and generation of relevant
background knowledge are thus important instructional
concerns within all three programs. While the four strategies
pivotal to RT involve the activation of background knowledge,
TSI and CORI take this perspective a step further by
strengthening the social aspect of meaning construction
through shared knowledge activation and knowledge genera-
tion (Allen, 2003; Guthrie, Wigfield, & Perencevich, 2004). Of
note is that this emphasis on meaning construction through
background knowledge activation also accords with several
prominent theoretical models of reading comprehension and
learning from text, such as Anderson’s (1994) schema-theo-
retic view, Kintsch’s (1988) construction-integration model,
Graesser et al.’s (1994) constructionist model, and Alexander’s
(1997) model of domain learning. Moreover, there is solid
empirical evidence that background knowledge may be
a highly influential determinant of reading comprehension,
with some of this influence mediated through its positive
influence on reading-strategy use (Cromley & Azevedo, 2007;
Fox, 2009).
The second principle, reading comprehension strategies,
holds that direct teaching of a limited number of reading strat-
egies may provide readers with the tools they need to construct
deep-level, inferential understanding of text. The four strategies
originally recommended by Palincsar and Brown (1984), that is,
predicting, questioning, clarifying, and summarizing, still seem
to be main ingredients in many comprehension instruction
programs, including TSI and CORI. Across programs, such
strategies are explicitly labelled and taught not only by expla-
nation but also by repeated modeling and scaffolding support,
with the goal being self-regulated strategy use on part of the
students (Hilden & Pressley, 2007). According to Taboada and
Guthrie (2004), strategic readers may be characterized by
competence, meaning that they can use a strategy well, aware-
ness, meaning that they also know about the strategy and when
and where this strategy works, and self-initiation, meaning that
they deliberately choose to use the strategy when it is appro-
priate. To become self-regulated strategic readers, students need
to develop all those three qualities, which is a long-term
development that may sometimes take years of strategy
instruction (Hilden & Pressley, 2007). Also, training teachers to
provide comprehension strategies instruction seems to require
considerable time and effort and should, preferably, be collab-
orative, gradual, and sensitive to changing contextual conditions
from classroom to classroom (Block & Duffy, 2008).
As indicated above, background knowledge may be needed
for reading comprehension strategies to occur. One reason that
we still distinguish between the principles of relevant back-
ground knowledge and reading comprehension strategies is
that background knowledge has been shown to have an effect
directly on comprehension in addition to an effect that is
 R. Andreassen, I. Bråten / Learning and Instruction 21 (2011) 520e537
mediated by strategies (Cromley & Azevedo, 2007). More-
over, use of comprehension strategies is not always related to
readers’ level of prior knowledge about text content
(McNamara & Magliano, 2009). The distinction between the
principles of relevant background knowledge and reading
comprehension instruction strategies is further clarified in
descriptions of the intervention, the seminars introducing the
principles to the intervention teachers, and how the imple-
mentation of the two principles was assessed (see below).
Obviously, activation and generation of relevant background
knowledge do not necessarily involve the teaching of reading
comprehension strategies.
The third principle, reading-group organization, is related
to the social aspect of comprehension instruction. Thus, RT,
TSI, and CORI all incorporate variants of cooperative
learning, with development towards self-regulated strategy use
purportedly facilitated by cooperation in small reading groups
where students share thoughts about how texts can be com-
prehended by means of multiple strategies. In such groups,
students differing with respect to abilities and skills are
supposed to provide scaffolding support for each other’s
comprehension processes. Our review of the literature also
indicated that reading groups are mostly teacher-led in RT (at
least in the original version) and mostly student-led in CORI,
with TSI seemingly falling somewhere in-between. The fact
that both teachers and students function as scaffolders of
comprehension processes in these programs (e.g., Brown,
Pressley, van Meter, & Schuder, 1996) may, at least in part,
be a virtue of necessity. In real classroom situations, it is not
possible for one teacher to lead and scaffold several reading
groups at the same time and, therefore, groups have to work
partly independent of the teacher, acting as teachers for each
other. The third principle is based on the premise that higher
psychological processes originate in relations between indi-
viduals and, in particular, in collaboration with more knowl-
edgeable others (Vygotsky, 1978). The principle has been
difficult to implement in US classrooms, however (Rosenshine
& Meister, 1994), and it can also be expected to represent
a challenge in the Norwegian context, with generally large
variations in student abilities and little experience with coop-
erative learning (Klette, 2003; van Daal et al., 2007).
The fourth principle, reading motivation, is derived from
TSI, relating comprehension strategy instruction to authentic
subject matter, and, even more clearly, from CORI’s engage-
ment perspective. The principle emphasizes that strategy use is
facilitated by interesting texts (Pressley, 2006) and opportu-
nities for choice (Guthrie et al., 2004), and that students need
to see the usefulness of strategies for reaching their reading
goals when working with content area texts (Brown et al.,
1996). This implies that reading comprehension strategies
should be taught in social contexts characterized by a variety
of interesting texts that students can choose among to increase
their conceptual understandings. Of note is that in CORI,
reading motivation is not only considered to facilitate
comprehension strategy use but is regarded as a goal in itself,
which together with strategy use, conceptual understanding,
and social interaction constitute reading engagement (Guthrie
523
& Wigfield, 2000). In particular, intrinsic reading motivation,
that is, the enjoyment of reading activities that are performed
for their own sake (Ryan & Deci, 2000), is an outcome
measure on a par with strategy and comprehension measures
in Guthrie and co-workers’ intervention studies (e.g., Guthrie
et al., 2004). From temporary positive affect and arousal
triggered by exciting activities and materials in the context,
termed situational interest (Hidi & Harackiewicz, 2000),
instructors thus seek to build long-term enthusiasm or intrinsic
motivation for reading in their students.
Somewhat paradoxically, the components of reading inter-
vention programs are often described in great detail, but the
way in which the programs are implemented in the classroom
is more seldom extensively reported on (Gersten, Fuchs,
Williams, & Baker, 2001; Pressley et al., 2006). This lack of
implementation or process data is problematic because infor-
mation is not provided concerning the quality with which the
different components of the intervention are put into practice.
Moreover, implementation or process data may help explain
the varying effects on outcome variables found in different
studies (Pressley et al., 2006; Rosenshine & Meister, 1994). As
indicated above, even within the same instructional frame-
work, such as CORI, effects are found to vary substantially
with respect to both reading motivation and reading compre-
hension (Guthrie et al., 2007). In response to this under-
specification of what is going on in classrooms during an
intervention, we took care to collect implementation data in
this study that could help us explain the effects (or lack of
effects) of ERCI on students.
It should also be noted that the contribution that different
skills and processes make to reading comprehension may
depend on how individuals are asked to indicate their under-
standing of what they read (Pearson & Hamm, 2005), with, for
example, the demands for both lower-level word recognition
skills and strategic processes varying across reading compre-
hension tests (Cain & Oakhill, 2006; Magliano, Millis, Ozuru,
& McNamara, 2007). In particular, deeper-level comprehen-
sion strategies are probably most needed when tests require
that readers construct a mental representation that reflects
deep, inferential understanding of text content (Graesser,
2007; Magliano et al., 2007). Moreover, it can be assumed
that such strategies play a more important role when text is
unavailable during testing (Andreassen & Bråten, 2010). This
is because readers in this situation probably have to use
comprehension strategies to construct an adequate mental
representation of text content during reading, whereas readers
may rely more on strategies related to searching for the correct
answer when text is available during testing. Another reason is
that readers may perceive the task as more challenging when
the text is unavailable and, therefore, deem it necessary to
invest more strategic effort in order to solve it. Finally, deeper-
level comprehension strategies are likely to play a larger role
when assessments use longer compared to shorter passages
(Andreassen & Bråten, 2010), for example because longer
passages may require more strategic processing (e.g., pre-
dicting, summarizing) to create coherent representations
(Graesser et al., 1994).
524 R. Andreassen, I. Bråten / Learning and Instruction 21 (2011) 520e537
1.3. The present study
Given this theoretical background analysis, we set out to
study the effects of teachers’ implementation of the four ERCI
principles (i.e., relevant background knowledge, reading
comprehension strategies, reading-group organization, and
reading motivation) in the content area of social studies on
fifth graders’ reading strategy use, reading motivation, and
reading comprehension, respectively. Because we assumed
that the teachers would need considerable preparation to
implement those principles in their classrooms, professional
development in the form of collaborative seminars was
provided in the semester before the intervention took place.
Still, we collected observation and questionnaire data to assess
to what extent the principles were actually implemented in the
ERCI teachers’ classrooms during the intervention period.
Moreover, to better isolate the effects of our instructional
approach, we tried to statistically control for the potential
effects of word recognition and working memory by using
those variables as covariates when comparing the intervention
group with controls on the outcome measures after the inter-
vention period. The effects of word recognition and working
memory on reading comprehension are well documented (for
reviews, see Swanson, Howard, & Sáez, 2007; Vellutino,
2003), and there is also reason to believe that strategic pro-
cessing is influenced by word recognition and working
memory, with skilled word recognition and good working
memory capacity presumably freeing adequate cognitive
resources for reading strategically to comprehend text
(Sinatra, Brown, & Reynolds, 2002; Walczyk et al., 2007).
Because it is conceivable that skilled word recognition and
good working memory capacity also increase students’ moti-
vation to read, we included word recognition and working
memory as covariates even for reading motivation outcomes.
Finally, our design (see below) did not preclude pre-inter-
vention differences between intervention group and controls
with respect to the outcome variables and, therefore, pre-
intervention measurements of strategy use, reading motivation,
and reading comprehension, respectively, were also included
as covariates in our analyses examining the effects of ERCI.
Specifically, we addressed the following four questions in
our investigation:
1. What is the effect of the ERCI intervention on fifth
graders’ use of comprehension strategies?
2. What is the effect of the ERCI intervention on fifth
graders’ reading motivation?
3. What is the effect of the ERCI intervention on fifth
graders’ reading comprehension?
4. How are the effects (or lack of effects) on strategy use,
motivation, and comprehension performance related to the
quality of the implementation of the four instructional
principles?
Given the time devoted to teacher preparation before the
intervention started, we expected to see some positive effects
on all three outcome variables (Hypothesis 1a). At the same
time, however, we entertained the possibility that the effects
on our outcome variables might depend on the extent to which
the different principles were implemented by the teachers
(Hypothesis 1b). Finally, based on both theoretical accounts
(e.g., Graesser, 2007; Graesser et al., 1994; Magliano et al.,
2007) and prior empirical evidence (e.g., Andreassen &
Bråten, 2010; Cromley & Azevedo, 2007), we expected that
any improvement in deeper-level strategic processing as
a result of the intervention would coincide with an improve-
ment on a reading comprehension task where students read
one long passage of expository text and then answered an
equal number of inferential and factual questions with text
unavailable during responding, but not necessarily with
improvement on comprehension tests involving the reading of
shorter passages, a larger proportion of factual questions, and
text available during responding (Hypothesis 2). The reason
for this expectation is, of course, that the former task may
demand more of students’ deep-level processing resources
than the latter tasks.
2. Method
2.1. Participants
The intervention group consisted of 55 girls and 48 boys in
five mixed-ability fifth-grade classes at three different schools
in a small town in south-east Norway. The teachers of these
students (4 female, 1 male) volunteered to participate in the
intervention and students participated with permission from
their parents. The teachers ranged in instructional practice
from 5 to 34 years (M ¼ 16 years). The control group con-
sisted of 64 girls and 49 boys from six randomly selected
mixed-ability fifth-grade classes at the remaining schools in
the same town. These students were taught by 5 female and 1
male teachers, ranging in instructional practice from 3.5 to 30
years (M ¼ 23 years). Permission was also given by the
parents of the control students. The participating students’
overall mean age at pre-test was 10.5 years. Because of
missing values, the number of students in the two groups
available for statistical analyses involving the outcome
measures varied somewhat, with the exact number of partici-
pants given in connection with each analysis (see Results
section below).
The vast majority of the participants were white native
speakers of Norwegian, with only 14 participants (12 in the
intervention group, 2 in the control group) having a first
language other than Norwegian, Swedish and Danish (which
have rather similar orthographies). All the participants atten-
ded regular classes but seven of them (5 in the intervention
group, 2 in the control group) were given special education
due to reading and writing difficulties. The average class size
was 22 students in the intervention classes and 21 students in
the control classes. At least in an international perspective, the
sample was homogeneous (i.e., middle class) with respect to
socioeconomic status.
 R. Andreassen, I. Bråten / Learning and Instruction 21 (2011) 520e537
2.2. Design and procedure
We used a non-equivalent groups pretesteposttest design.
Although schools and classes were not randomly assigned to
conditions, they were comparable in the sense that they were
located in the same municipality and included students in the
same grade taught according to the same curriculum by
experienced teachers in mixed-ability classrooms. Moreover,
possible pre-test differences were statistically controlled for.
Before the intervention started, professional development was
provided during five 3-h meetings over a period of three
months. ERCI was then implemented in five 45-m social
studies lessons a week over a period of 18 weeks, from
January to May in Grade 5. In the same period, the students in
the control group were taught according to the same social
studies curriculum using ordinary practices, that is, with no
special emphasis on reading comprehension instruction.
Pre-test data on reading strategy use, reading motivation,
and reading comprehension were collected during two weeks
in the autumn term of Grade 5, and post-test data on the same
variables were collected five months later, that is, after the
intervention. Pre-test data were also collected with respect to
word recognition and working memory. All materials were
group-administered to students in the intervention and control
groups in their ordinary classrooms by the first author.
Implementation data were collected by means of classroom
observations and questionnaires at the beginning and at the
end of the intervention period. The intervention, the profes-
sional development, the measures, and the assessment of
implementation quality are further described below in that
order.
2.3. Intervention
The instructional content consisted of topics from the
Norwegian national fifth-grade social studies curriculum. This
content area was chosen because all teachers involved in the
intervention taught social studies in their fifth-grade class-
rooms. Moreover, social studies require extensive expository
text comprehension. The specific topics of instruction were
Nordic Stone Age, Bronze Age, and Iron Age, as well as
Norwegian natural landscape and geography. The same topics
were taught in the same order to the control group during the
same period. Within ERCI, teachers attempted to use the
following four instructional practices, which were derived
from the principles of relevant background knowledge,
reading comprehension strategies, reading-group organization,
and reading motivation (see above).
2.3.1. Classroom dialogues to activate and generate
relevant background knowledge
The implementation of relevant background knowledge
involves that teachers focus on activating prior and building
new, related knowledge in the students that is relevant to what
they read. Through deeper-level questions, classroom dia-
logues, and engaged discussions teachers thus seek to promote
knowledge-driven reading (Guthrie et al., 2004) within
525
communities of learners interacting to construct background
knowledge that can facilitate comprehension of the topic in
question.
2.3.2. Strategies instruction through modeling and
scaffolding
The second practice refers to the explicit teaching of pre-
dicting, questioning, clarifying, and summarizing (Palincsar &
Brown, 1984), with those strategies used to connect readers’
background knowledge to the content of the texts. Specifically,
modeling involves teachers thinking aloud during reading, and
scaffolding involves gradually shifting responsibility for stra-
tegic text processing to the students (cf., Wood, Bruner, &
Ross, 1976). Inspired by Oczkus (2005), the intention was to
make modeling more motivating and understandable to
students by presenting them with four characters representing
the strategies. After the initial presentation and modeling of
the strategies, teachers should thus put these characters on
classroom posters, bookmarks, and cue cards reminding the
students to use the strategies to help them comprehend and
learn from text. Specifically, a fortune teller represented pre-
dicting, a curious boy represented questioning, a detective
represented clarifying, and a cowboy with a lasso represented
summarizing. The aim of the second practice is to help
students appropriate the four strategies on the basis of exten-
sive modeling and scaffolding on part of the teachers.
2.3.3. Small-group interactions during strategic reading
The third practice refers to small groups of students
working together while predicting what the author will discuss
next, generating good questions to text, clarifying challenging
terms and expressions, and summarizing previously read
passages. After a period of initial training, the groups are
expected to complete assigned reading tasks in this way
without any direct supervision from the teacher, requiring that
the group work is well structured and that the structure is
learned in advance. Ideally, the groups should consist of 4e5
students, and the reading task should be clearly defined to the
students and require the participation of all group members
(cf., Cohen, 1994). In ERCI, the group talk should be char-
acterized by students thinking aloud about their own and other
students’ strategy use to make text comprehension processes
an object of discussion. In accordance with the general
recommendations of the Norwegian national curriculum,
mixed-ability reading groups are the rule in ERCI.
2.3.4. Relating reading to student interest in subject matter
As particularly emphasized in CORI, the fourth instructional
practice refers to the promotion of interest-driven, concept-
oriented reading. ERCI teachers were thus encouraged to
identify the central social studies concepts taught during the
intervention and to stimulate students’ interest and curiosity to
read and learn about those concepts by means of real world
interactions, demonstrations, and field trips. Moreover,
students’ interest in developing conceptual understanding
through reading is supposed to be supported by allowing them
choice among subtopics and texts according to their interests
526 R. Andreassen, I. Bråten / Learning and Instruction 21 (2011) 520e537
rather than having them stick to one single textbook common to
all students. For this purpose, relevant trade books to supplement
the textbook were provided through cooperation with the local
library. ERCI teachers were encouraged to guide the students to
match texts to their interests and their actual reading levels,
however. The fourth practice is especially targeting intrinsic
motivation in attempting to catch and hold their interest in
reading about substantive concepts (Guthrie & Wigfield, 2000;
Hidi & Harackiewicz, 2000).
2.4. Professional development
The four principles derived from RT, TSI, and CORI were
introduced to the ERCI teachers as a group by the first author
and personalized by means of five 3-h collaborative seminars
from September through November the semester before the
intervention started. In these seminars, instructional practice
related to each principle was discussed, resulting in a list of
example activities that was handed out to the teachers after the
last meeting. Except for one teacher who attended four
seminars, all teachers attended five seminars. In the following,
we briefly describe the content of the five seminars.
2.4.1. First seminar
This seminar focused on the importance of background
knowledge. After a short introduction on the role of back-
ground knowledge in reading comprehension, examples of
how students’ background knowledge could be activated and
complemented during classroom dialogues and social inter-
actions were discussed. The three questions guiding this
discussion were (example activities provided by the teachers
and the researcher in cooperation are given in parentheses):
How can my classroom practice focus on students’ diverse
background knowledge and the construction of new
knowledge (e.g., classroom dialogues, concept maps, think-
alouds)?
How can classroom dialogues activate relevant back-
ground knowledge (e.g., asking deeper-level questions,
accepting and praising different points of view, avoiding
right/wrong responses, more time for student-talk opposed
to teacher-talk, modeling own thinking)?
What can deeper-level questions be like (e.g., why ques-
tions rather than who-what-where questions, thought-
provoking questions rather than text-based questions,
in-depth questions rather than surface questions)?
2.4.2. Second and third seminar
These seminars focused on the four comprehension strate-
gies, aiming at giving the teachers an understanding of those
strategies and discussing how they can be effectively taught in
the classroom. Moreover, the strategies were modeled by the
researcher, and the teachers were encouraged to model their
own strategic thinking for each other during reading. The
following questions guided the discussion (examples of
activities provided by the teachers and the researcher in
cooperation in parentheses):
How can the four strategies be introduced to my students
(e.g., explaining the importance of using the strategies,
teacher think-alouds, use of four characters to represent the
strategies, posters with the characters on classroom walls)?
How can my students be taught to use the strategies (e.g.,
repeated modeling, reading aloud and employing strategies
together with the students, cooperative reading groups,
scaffolding students’ strategy use, reminding strategy use)?
How can modeling help my students learn the strategies
(e.g., observing best practice, modeling for each other by
thinking aloud)?
How can I create progression (e.g., from teacher modeling
and scaffolding to students modeling for each other to
students self-regulating strategy use, from teaching one
strategy at a time to teaching all strategies together)?
2.4.3. Fourth seminar
This seminar focused on reading-group organization with
the aims of providing the teachers with an understanding of
the social aspect of comprehension instruction and discussing
examples of how cooperative learning can be used in the
classroom. The following questions guided the discussion
(examples provided by the teachers in cooperation with the
researcher in parentheses):
How can social interactions during reading and strategy
use be organized in my classroom (e.g., small groups (4e5
students), peer teaching, progression from teacher-led
whole class activities to student-led cooperative groups)?
Which criteria can be used to create groups (e.g.,
heterogeneity regarding reading ability, separation of
particular students)?
What are good cooperation skills (e.g., using low voice,
listening, asking for explanations, giving positive feedback,
specific and concrete criticism)?
How can students be taught to cooperate (e.g., teacher
demonstrations, more proficient groups modeling for less
proficient groups, cooperation support by teacher, group
evaluation at the end of lessons)?
How can struggling readers be helped (e.g., better readers
reading aloud or together with struggling readers, groups
reading together, temporary homogeneous groups for
struggling readers)?
2.4.4. Fifth seminar
The last seminar focused on the motivational aspect of
comprehension instruction. After a brief lecture on the moti-
vational components emphasized in CORI, the following
questions guided the discussion (examples provided by the
teachers and the researcher in cooperation in parentheses):
 R. Andreassen, I. Bråten / Learning and Instruction 21 (2011) 520e537
How can students be introduced to and become interested
in the topic of study? (e.g., classroom dialogues, real-world
experiences, field trips to historical places, visiting
museums, diverse learning materials, interesting books)?
To what extent may students choose subtopics of partic-
ular interest (from few choices in the beginning to gradu-
ally more choices according to interests)?
To what extent may students choose books according to
interests (topic-relevant trade books that the students might
select made available through the local library, guidance of
students to select texts according to interests and reading
skills)?
No professional development was provided for the teachers
of the control group. They were briefly informed about the
project and their role as control group teachers before the
intervention started. In addition, they were only contacted to
make appointments in connection with the pre- and post-tests.
After the post-test, a questionnaire concerning their reading
lessons and social studies instruction was sent to them. To try
to avoid compensatory rivalry in participants not receiving
treatment (Shadish, Cook, & Campbell, 2002), the control
teachers were offered similar professional development the
next school year.
2.5. Measures
2.5.1. Overview of the assessment
Word recognition, working memory, strategy use, reading
motivation, and reading comprehension were assessed before
the intervention started, during two weeks in November/
December in Grade 5. After the intervention, during two
weeks in May/June in Grade 5, strategy use and reading
motivation were assessed once more with the same measures,
and reading comprehension was assessed with three other
measures. At both pre-test and post-test, the first author group
administered all measures to both the ERCI and the control
classes, assisted by one teacher or teacher assistant in each
class. The assessment required two 45-m periods at both pre-
test and post-test. Next, we describe each specific measure
included in the assessment.
2.5.2. Pre-test measures
Please note that the measures of word recognition, working
memory, strategy use, and reading comprehension adminis-
tered at pre-test and described in the following were used as
covariates in statistical analyses.
2.5.2.1. Word recognition test. To assess word recognition
skills, we used a standardized measure called the Word Chain
Test (Høien & Tønnesen, 1997), designed to assess the ability
to recognize whole words rapidly. Participants viewed 90 word
chains, each containing four words written without any space
between the words. The words were high-frequency words
presumably well known to the participants, both phonologi-
cally and semantically. Participants were instructed to indicate
as many words as possible during a 4-m period by drawing
527
vertical lines between the words. The scoring was done by
counting the number of correct word chains. Høien and
Tønnesen (1997) reported a split-half reliability of .99 for
this measure. In the present study, the reliability estimate
(Cronbach’s alpha) for scores on the Word Chain Test was .94.
With respect to validity, prior research (e.g., Bråten, Lie,
Andreassen, & Olaussen, 1999) indicates that this task
favors readers with accessible and well-established ortho-
graphic representations in the lexicon, and it can thus be
assumed to assess orthographically (rather than phonologi-
cally) based word recognition (Bråten, Lie, & Andreassen,
1998). Also according to Jacobson (1995), this task is valid
for assessing word recognition skills, correlating with
measures of both silent reading and oral word reading.
2.5.2.2. Working memory measure. To assess working
memory as the simultaneous storage and processing of infor-
mation (Baddeley, 1990), we used a Norwegian adaption of
Swanson and Trahan’s (1992) Working Memory Span Task,
which is an adaptation for children of the Reading Span Test
developed for adults by Daneman and Carpenter (1980), with
no reading required for the children. Seven sets of unrelated
sentences were read aloud to the participants with a 2-s
interval between the sentences. The number of sentences in
a set was gradually increased from two to five. The students
were required to remember the final word in each sentence so
that they could later write it down on a response form handed
out prior to reading. To insure that the students comprehended
(i.e., processed) the sentences and did not merely treat this
task as one of verbal memory for the final words, they were
also required to write down the answer to a question related to
one of the sentences (randomly selected) just after a set was
presented and before they wrote down the final words. All the
sentences and the comprehension questions were presented
orally to the students by the test administrator.
Three practice trials were administered in dialogue with the
students. Items were scored zero if the question was not
answered correctly, no matter how many final words were
remembered. If the question was answered correctly, the
scoring was done by counting the number of final words
remembered. Words were not judged to be errors if spelled
incorrectly. Maximum score was 23. Cronbach’s alpha for
scores on the measure was .79 in this study.
2.5.2.3. Comprehension strategy measure. As a measure of
comprehension strategies, we used a Norwegian adaptation of
Lederer’s (2000) strategy assessment tool, with this approach
also used by Guthrie et al. (2004) in assessing the effects of
CORI. The assessment focused on the strategies described by
Palincsar and Brown (1984), and the participants were
instructed to write down their predictions, questions, clarifi-
cations, and summaries during the study of a particular text. In
the sense of Taboada and Guthrie (2004), the strategy
assessment presumably targeted strategic competence more
that awareness and self-initiation. Two different expository
texts with the same length and difficulty level were used
during strategy assessment, one about knights in the Middle
528 R. Andreassen, I. Bråten / Learning and Instruction 21 (2011) 520e537
Ages and one about Sámi in Northern Scandinavia. Both were
selected from middle-school social studies textbooks, but
neither topic had been studied by the participants nor as part of
their social studies courses. The participants were assigned
randomly to one of the two texts and were presented with
a brief written instruction in connection with the assessment of
each strategy. Please note that these texts were not used to
assess reading comprehension.
In the assessment of prediction, participants saw only the
headline of the text and a corresponding picture, with an
instruction to write down what they thought the following text
might be about. Scores from 0 to 4 were given according to the
number of relevant concepts included in the prediction and the
extent to which those concepts were connected in the predic-
tion. One additional point was awarded when participants
explained the basis for their prediction.
Question generating was assessed by asking participants to
write down three good questions to the text after reading.
Scoring was done by awarding from 0 to 4 points for each
question, dependent on the number of important concepts
included in the questions.
Clarifying was measured by having participants write down
explanations for two words included in the text after reading,
with the meaning of those words unknown to the participants
before reading the text. Scores from 0 to 3 were given for each
word, with 1 point awarded for a partly correct definition and 2
points awarded for a completely correct definition. One
additional point was awarded if participants were able to
describe how they reasoned when working on the text to
clarify the meaning of the word.
Finally, summarizing was assessed by asking participants to
make a brief summary of the text after reading, with four lines
available for writing down the summary. According to the
number of important concepts included in the summary, and
the degree of connection between the concepts, summarizing
was scored from 0 to 5.
The participants were given 20 min to complete the strategy
assessment. A sum score was calculated by adding the scores
for all four strategy tasks. The maximum score was 28.
Interrater reliability was estimated by two raters (the first
author and a trained college student) independently deter-
mining the strategy scores for a randomly selected 15% of the
participants, with the interrater reliability (Cohen’s kappa)
over items equalling .88. Cronbach’s alpha for participants’
scores on the comprehension strategy measure was .65.
2.5.2.4. Measures of reading motivation. To assess reading
motivation, we used a Norwegian adaptation of Swan’s (2003)
version of the Motivation for Reading Questionnaire (MRQ)
(Wigfield & Guthrie, 1997). In Swan’s version of the MRQ,
items are divided into the two basic categories of intrinsic and
extrinsic motivation, with intrinsic motivation including the
aspects reading efficacy, challenge, curiosity, involvement, and
importance, and extrinsic motivation including the aspects of
recognition, grades, social, competition, compliance, and
reading work avoidance. Accordingly, our 36-item question-
naire consisted of 18 items written to measure intrinsic reading
motivation (sample item: I read to learn something new about
things that interest me) and 18 items written to measure
extrinsic reading motivation (sample item: I like being the best
at reading in my class). The participants rated each item on
a 5-point Likert-type scale ranging from does not fit at all (1)
to fits very well (5).
An initial principal component analysis with oblique rota-
tion on the 36 motivation items yielded 10 factors with
eigenvalues greater than 1 that explained 65.6% of the total
sample variation. Based on the sizes of the eigenvalues and the
scree plot, we explored the underlying structure of the reading
motivation scores further by trying to force three- as well as
two-factor solutions on all the items. After having deleted
items that did not load on any factor or loaded significantly on
more than one factor, two factors with high loadings (>.40)
and no overlap for any item were identified. This two-factor
solution included 26 items of the reading motivation ques-
tionnaire. The two factors had eigenvalues of 6.52 and 3.45,
respectively, and explained 36.9% of the total sample varia-
tion. The first factor consisted of 16 items pertaining to
intrinsic motivation, with all items originally included to
address the intrinsic category of motivation. The second factor
consisted of 10 items focusing on extrinsic reading motivation,
with all items originally included to assess the extrinsic
category of motivation. On the basis of this factor analysis,
two scales measuring intrinsic and extrinsic reading motiva-
tion, respectively, were constructed. After having divided the
scores on the scales by the number of items, the scores on each
scale ranged from 1 to 5. The reliabilities (Cronbach’s alpha)
for the scores on the scales measuring intrinsic and extrinsic
reading motivation, respectively, were .87 and .83.
2.5.2.5. Reading comprehension measure. At pre-test, we
used a standardized Norwegian version of a Danish test called
the Sentence Reading Test (SRT) (Nielsen, Kreiner, Poulsen,
& Søegård, 1995). This test is frequently used as a screening
test of reading comprehension in Norway as well as in the
other Scandinavian countries. It consists of 40 short text
passages, each of them linked to five pictures printed below
the passage. The participants were instructed to choose among
the five alternative pictures the one that represented the
meaning of the above printed passage by drawing a diagonal
across that picture. Please note that the text passage was
available during responding. There was a gradually increasing
length of the passages throughout the testing, from one to three
sentences and from seven to 27 words. The total number of
words in this test was 363. Of the 40 items of the SRT, six (i.e.
15%) seemed to require inferences in the sense that students
had to combine information from more than one sentence to
identify the correct picture. The rest of the items could be
classified as literal questions because the correct picture could
be identified on the basis of an explicit description in one
sentence of the passage. Participants were given 5 min to read
the passages and mark the corresponding pictures. Although
the test manual for the SRT indicates a time limit of 10 min,
piloting the SRT in two fifth-grade classrooms not included in
the investigation indicated that a time limit of 5 min was more
 R. Andreassen, I. Bråten / Learning and Instruction 21 (2011) 520e537
appropriate to avoid ceiling effects. The reliability estimate
(Cronbach’s alpha) for participants’ SRT scores was .92.
2.5.3. Post-test measures
Please note that the measures of strategy use, reading
motivation, and reading comprehension administered at post-
test and described in the following were used as dependent
variables in statistical analyses.
2.5.3.1. Comprehension strategy and reading motivation
measures. The measures used to assess strategy use and reading
motivation, respectively, were the same as at pre-test. The only
exception was that during strategy assessment, each participant
was assigned to the alternative text at post-test. There was no
relationship between text alternative and strategy use, however
(pre-test: r ¼ .01, ns; post-test: r ¼ .12, ns).
2.5.3.2. Reading comprehension measures. Reading compre-
hension was assessed by means of three tests of different
formats, also varying with respect to their demands on infer-
ence generation. The first measure was a maze task consisting
of an 1169-word narrative text in the form of an African fable,
much used for assessing reading comprehension in Norwegian
middle-grade classrooms (Nordgreen, 1994). The maze task
format is a multiple-choice variation of the cloze task, with
alternative choices for each deleted word. The format is
regarded as sensitive to reading comprehension for younger
students (McKenna & Stahl, 2009; Shin, Deno, & Espin,
2000). The items in the task that we used consisted of 33
parentheses containing three alternative words appearing in
every third to eighth sentence. In each parenthesis, students
were to underline the correct alternative while reading. Of the
33 items of the maze task, four (i.e., 12%) could be catego-
rized as inferential questions in the sense that the answers
could not be directly located in the selection but required that
the readers made logical connections among facts (McKenna
& Stahl, 2009). The participants were given 10 min to
complete the task. Also on the maze task, the time limit was
chosen on the basis of piloting in two fifth-grade classrooms to
avoid either floor or ceiling effects. The reliability estimate
(Cronbach’s alpha) for participants’ scores on the maze task
was .70.
The second measure of reading comprehension was
a multiple-choice measure with text available during testing.
This was a much used standardized test published by the
Norwegian Learning Center (Læringssenteret, 2003), as
a comprehension subtest in a larger fifth-grade assessment
battery of reading skills. It was called the Norwegian Learning
Center Test (NLCT). The students were instructed to read
three expository text passages about spiders consisting of 91,
82, and 95 words, respectively. After each passage, three
multiple-choice comprehension questions were to be
answered, that is, a total of nine questions. For each question,
the students had to choose one of four alternative answers by
drawing a cross next to it. They were informed that they were
allowed to look back to the passage when answering the
comprehension questions. Of the nine questions of the NLCT,
529
three (i.e., 33%) could be categorized as inferential questions
while six could be categorized as literal questions, with the
last category only requiring that participants were able to
remember or locate a piece of factual information explicitly
stated in the text (cf., McKenna & Stahl, 2009). In accordance
with the test manual, participants were given 4 min to read the
three text passages and answer the nine comprehension
questions. According to the test manual (Læringssenteret,
2003), the split-half reliability for the scores in a representa-
tive sample of 1587 Norwegian fifth-graders equalled .83. In
the present sample, Cronbach’s alpha for scores on the NLCT
was .75.
The third measure of reading comprehension used at post-
test was a multiple-choice measure with text unavailable
during responding. This was a researcher-developed test con-
sisting of a 210-word expository text and 11 multiple-choice
comprehension questions. The text was selected from a fifth-
grade social studies textbook not used by the participants, and
the topic of the passage was Norwegian fisheries. We simply
called this test the researcher-generated test (RGT). Each of
the 11 multiple-choice questions had four response options,
and participants were to answer all questions after the reading
of the entire passage. Of the 11 questions, five (i.e., 45%)
could be classified as inferential and six as literal questions
(cf., McKenna & Stahl, 2009). In addition to differences
regarding passage length and proportion of inference ques-
tions, an important difference between this measure and the
two other reading comprehension measures used at post-test
was that it was completed without the text passage available
when answering questions. Thus, the participants were
instructed that they had 5 min to study the text and that the text
had to be handed in before they were given a separate sheet
with questions to the text. The participants were given 10 min
to answer the 11 questions, with this time limit also deemed
appropriate to avoid floor or ceiling effects on the basis of our
piloting of the instrument. The reliability estimate (Cronbach’s
alpha) for participants’ scores on the RGT was .70.
2.6. Assessing implementation of the instructional
framework
To answer the research question concerning the relationship
between implementation quality and the effects (or lack of
effects) of the intervention, both observational and question-
naire data were collected. The first author made observations
of two ERCI lessons at the beginning (after 6e8 weeks) and
two at the end (after 16e17 weeks) of the intervention period
on two different days in each classroom. Each of the ERCI
teachers were thus observed for four lessons in all. No
observations were made of control group teachers. In addition,
questionnaires were answered by the teachers at the end of the
intervention period. Two questionnaires were designed: One
21-item questionnaire was answered by all teachers in both
conditions (last week of May), and one 22-item questionnaire
was only answered by the ERCI teachers (first week of June).
530 R. Andreassen, I. Bråten / Learning and Instruction 21 (2011) 520e537
2.6.1. Observations
The observations used check-list procedures (Judd, Smith,
& Kidder, 1991), focusing on instructional practices reflect-
ing the four ERCI principles. A check-list was filled out in
each lesson by marking the list when an observed practice
matched a description (i.e., check point) on the list. After each
observed lesson, the teacher was asked to what extent that
particular lesson was representative of his or her ERCI
instruction and in what way, if any, the lesson differed from
other ERCI lessons. The four parts of the check list are
described next.
In the first part of the check list, targeting the imple-
mentation of relevant background knowledge, teachers’ verbal
initiatives and verbal responses were registered. The check
point for initiatives differentiated between five types of
initiatives: Asking factual questions (topic-related or strategy-
related), asking deeper-level questions (topic-related or
strategy-related), describing or explaining topic issues,
modeling thinking, and requesting students to model their own
thinking. The check point for responses differentiated between
seven alternatives, four concerning responses to student
questions and three concerning responses to student answers.
The alternatives for responses to student questions reflected
a continuum from providing the right answer to encouraging
students to reflect on the question. The alternatives for
responses to student answers varied from evaluating the
answer as right or wrong to encouraging students to elaborate
upon the answer.
The second part of the check list targeted the imple-
mentation of reading comprehension strategies. For each of
the four strategies, the following seven check-points were
used: The teacher explaining the strategy to the students, the
teacher modeling the strategy for the students, the teacher
reminding the students to use the strategy, the teacher scaf-
folding the strategy use of an individual student, a student
modeling or explaining the strategy, the teacher giving stra-
tegic reading as an assignment, and self-initiated strategy use.
In addition to these check-points used for each strategy, there
was a check point for registering the integration of multiple
strategies.
The third part of the check list, targeting the implementa-
tion of reading-group organization, focused on cooperation
between students during strategic reading comprehension. The
following four check point were used for registration: Students
sitting in small groups without any cooperation or dialogue
concerning text materials, students sitting in small groups
Table 1
Correlations among variables at pre-test.
Variable 1 2
1. Word recognition e
2. Working memory .45***
3. Strategy use .31***
4. Extrinsic motivation .10
5. Intrinsic motivation .20**
6. Reading comprehension (SRT) .69***
Note. SRT ¼ Sentence Reading Test. *p < .05. **p < .01. ***p < .001.
cooperating on text materials but not modeling strategies or
giving feedback to each other, students sitting in pairs
modeling strategies and giving feedback to each other, and
small group cooperation with students modeling strategies and
giving feedback to each other.
Finally, the fourth part of the check list targeted the
implementation of reading motivation. The following six
points were checked: The teacher organizing real-world
experiences related to topics of study (i.e., the central
concepts), the teacher leading classroom dialogue about
central concepts, the teacher allowing students to choose
subtopics according to interests, the teacher allowing students
to choose among topic-relevant texts according to interests, the
teacher guiding individual students’ choice of text, and the
teacher having all students read the same text at the same time.
2.6.2. Questionnaires
The 21-item questionnaire given to all teachers contained
a combination of open-ended and Likert-type questions con-
cerning teacher characteristics related to education and rele-
vant experience as well as instructional practices related to
each of the four ERCI principles (e.g., concerning their
teaching of summarization and their use of different books in
the classroom).
The 22-item questionnaire given only to the ERCI teachers
also contained a combination of open-ended and Likert-type
questions. These questions asked the teachers to judge the
ease/difficulty of implementing each of the four principles in
their classrooms and their success (or lack of it) in promoting
strategic reading comprehension and cooperative learning
among their students during the intervention period.
When trying to decide whether each of the four principles
had been appropriately implemented in the ERCI classrooms
or not, teachers’ responses to the questionnaires were used to
supplement the information about instructional practices
gathered through the classroom observations. By utilizing
different data sources in this way, we hoped to strengthen the
validity of our conclusions concerning implementation quality.
3. Results
Correlations among variables at pre-test and post-test,
respectively, are shown for all participants in Tables 1 and 2.
At pre-test, word recognition and working memory correlated
positively with reading comprehension, as did strategy use and
intrinsic motivation. Moreover, word recognition and working
3 4 5 6
e
.38*** e
.14 .02 e
.12 .18* .29*** e
.47*** .33*** .13 .22** e
 R. Andreassen, I. Bråten / Learning and Instruction 21 (2011) 520e537 531

Table 2 Table 4
Correlations among variables at post-test. Adjusted marginal means and standard errors for dependent variables.
Variable 1 2 3 4 5 6 Measure Intervention Control
1. Strategy use e M SE M SE
2. Extrinsic motivation .12 e Strategy use 10.64 .34 8.38 .34
3. Intrinsic motivation .18* .36*** e Extrinsic motivation 2.92 .08 3.03 .08
4. Reading comprehension .47*** -.30*** .25*** e
Intrinsic motivation 3.22 .08 3.13 .07
(maze) Reading comprehension (maze) 22.88 .55 21.71 .54
5. Reading comprehension .42*** -.24** .27*** .71*** e Reading comprehension (NLCT) 6.15 .16 6.14 .16
(NLCT) Reading comprehension (RGT) 6.83 .24 5.92 .23
6. Reading comprehension .48*** -.21** .24** .68*** .59*** e
(RGT) Note. NLCT ¼ Norwegian Learning Center Test, RGT ¼ ResearchereGenerated
Test.
Note. NLCT ¼ Norwegian Learning Center Test, RGT ¼ ResearcherGenerated
Test. *p < .05. **p < .01. ***p < .001.
( p ¼ .28). Moreover, the covariates did not interact with
memory were positively correlated, and each of these variables condition ( ps > .34), indicating that our data met the
also correlated positively with strategy use. At post-test, scores assumption of homogeneous regression slopes. Table 4 shows
on the three reading comprehension measures correlated the adjusted marginal means and standard errors for the
positively. Moreover, both strategy use and intrinsic motiva- dependent variables. The ANCOVA showed a statistically
tion correlated positively with all three comprehension significant effect of condition on the comprehension strategy
measures, as well as with each other. Finally, external reading measure after adjustment by covariates. That is, consistent
motivation correlated negatively with all three comprehension with our hypothesis, students participating in the ERCI inter-
measures. vention (M ¼ 10.64) displayed more use of reading compre-
Table 3 shows descriptive statistics (means, standard devi- hension strategies than did students in the control condition
ations, and coefficients of skewness) for all measured variables (M ¼ 8.38), with F(1, 176) ¼ 21.49, p ¼ .000, partial
at pre-test and post-test in both conditions (i.e., intervention h2 ¼ .11. Moreover, the covariates of word recognition, F(1,
and control group). As can be seen, all score distributions were 176) ¼ 25.98, p ¼ .000, partial h2 ¼ .13, and pre-test strategy
approximately normal and, thus, appropriate for use in para- use F(1, 176) ¼ 11.77, p ¼ .001, h2 ¼ .06, uniquely adjusted
metric statistical analyses. comprehension strategies, while adjustment by working
To address our first research question, concerning the effect memory did not quite reach a conventional level of statistical
of our intervention on the use of reading comprehension significance, F(1, 176) ¼ 3.68, p ¼ .057, partial h2 ¼ .02. This
strategies, we performed an analysis of covariance (ANCOVA) indicates that students displaying better word recognition skill
on the comprehension strategy measure with pre-test word and strategy use at pre-test were more likely to use compre-
recognition, working memory, and strategy use as covariates, hension strategies at post-test.
and with condition (intervention vs. control) as the indepen- Next, to address our second research question, concerning
dent variable. Ninety students in the intervention group and 91 the effects of the intervention on reading motivation, we per-
students in the control group had complete data sets and were formed two separate ANCOVAs, one on extrinsic reading
available for this analysis. Levene’s test indicated that the motivation and one on intrinsic reading motivation. In both
assumption of homogeneity of variances was not violated analyses, Levene’s test indicated homogeneity of variances;
p ¼ .98 for extrinsic motivation, and p ¼ .59 for intrinsic
Table 3 motivation. Moreover, the covariates did not interact with
Descriptive statistics for variables at pre-test and post-test.
condition in any of the analyses ( ps > .26 in the analysis on
Measure Intervention Control extrinsic motivation, and ps > .42 in the analysis on intrinsic
M SD Skew M SD Skew motivation), indicating that our data met the assumption of
Pre-test homogeneous regression slopes. The first analysis, using word
Word recognition 21.00 7.30 .06 23.80 8.00 .19 recognition, working memory, and pre-test extrinsic reading
Working memory 8.44 4.72 .25 10.07 6.06 .14 motivation as covariates, showed no effect of condition, F(1,
Strategy use 7.70 3.59 .21 7.42 3.35 .57
175) ¼ .95, p ¼ .33, partial h2 ¼ .005, with the adjusted marginal
Extrinsic motivation 3.17 .84 .44 3.03 .84 .00
Intrinsic motivation 3.39 .70 .19 3.30 .83 .50 means almost the same for the two groups (see Table 4). Only the
Reading comprehension (SRT) 15.47 4.43 .19 16.46 5.28 .16 covariate of pre-test extrinsic motivation uniquely adjusted the
Post-test scores on post-test extrinsic motivation, F(1, 175) ¼ 79.19,
Strategy use 10.19 3.83 .10 8.65 3.76 .25 p ¼ .000, partial h2 ¼ .31. Eighty-nine students in the inter-
Extrinsic motivation 2.99 .87 .11 3.00 .93 .02
vention group and 91 students in the control group had complete
Intrinsic motivation 3.22 .84 .19 3.12 .79 .46
Reading comprehension (maze) 22.04 7.19 .43 23.21 7.33 .77 data sets and were available for this analysis. The second anal-
Reading comprehension (NLCT) 6.01 2.13 .11 6.25 1.98 .37 ysis, using word recognition, working memory, and pre-test
Reading comprehension (RGT) 6.24 3.09 .39 5.89 2.92 .41 intrinsic reading motivation as covariates, also showed no effect
Note. SRT ¼ Sentence Reading Test, NLCT ¼ Norwegian Learning Center of condition, F(1, 165) ¼ .69, p ¼ .41, partial h2 ¼ .004 (see
Test, RGT ¼ ResearcherGenerated Test. Table 4 for the adjusted marginal means). Only the covariate of
532 R. Andreassen, I. Bråten / Learning and Instruction 21 (2011) 520e537
pre-test intrinsic motivation uniquely adjusted the scores on
post-test intrinsic motivation, F(1, 165) ¼ 62.01, p ¼ .000,
partial h2 ¼ .27. For this analysis, 84 students in the intervention
group and 86 students in the control group were available.
The third research question, concerning the effects of our
intervention on reading comprehension, was addressed
through a multivariate analysis of covariance (MANCOVA) on
the three comprehension measures administered at post-test,
that is, the maze task, the Norwegian Learning Center Test
(NLCT), and the researcher-generated test (RGT). Covariates
were pre-test word recognition, working memory, and reading
comprehension (i.e., the Sentence Reading Test [SRT]), and
the independent variable was condition (intervention and
control). Eighty-nine students in the intervention group and 90
students in the control group had complete data sets and were
available for this analysis. Levene’s test indicated that the
assumption of homogeneity of variances was not violated for
any of the dependent measures ( ps > .10). Moreover, the
covariates did not interact with condition ( ps > .05), indi-
cating that the assumption of homogeneous regression slopes
was met. Box’s M test indicated that variance-covariance
matrices were not different across cells, F(6, 226909) ¼ .75,
p ¼ .61. Finally, multivariate normality could be assumed
because each dependent variable considered separately fol-
lowed a normal distribution (see Table 3).
With the use of Wilks’ criterion, the combined dependent
variables were statistically significantly affected by condition,
Wilks’ l ¼ .95, F(3, 172) ¼ 2.98, p ¼ .033, partial h2 ¼ .05, as
well as by the covariates of word recognition, Wilks’ l ¼ .83,
F(3, 172) ¼ 12.05, p ¼ .000, partial h2 ¼ .17, working
memory, Wilks’ l ¼ .92, F(3, 172) ¼ 4.77, p ¼ .003, partial
h2 ¼ .08, and pre-test reading comprehension, Wilks’ l ¼ .80,
F(3, 172) ¼ 14.53, p ¼ .000, partial h2 ¼ .20. We performed
three follow-up ANCOVAs to investigate the effect of condi-
tion on each comprehension measure, as well as the unique
adjustment by covariates of each dependent variable. Table 4
shows the adjusted marginal means and standard errors for
each of the two groups on the three comprehension measures.
As expected, the ANCOVAs showed a statistically significant
effect of condition on the RGT after adjustment by covariates,
with students in the intervention condition (M ¼ 6.83) out-
performing students in the control condition (M ¼ 5.92), F(1,
174) ¼ 7.34, p ¼ .007, partial h2 ¼ .04. However, there were
no statistically significant effect of condition on the maze task,
F(1, 174) ¼ 2.28, p ¼ .13, partial h2 ¼ .01, or the NLCT, F(1,
174) ¼ .001, p ¼ .98, partial h2 ¼ .00. Word recognition
uniquely adjusted the scores on the maze task, F(1,
174) ¼ 33.57, p ¼ .000, partial h2 ¼ .16, and the NLCT, F(1,
174) ¼ 6.21, p ¼ .014, partial h2 ¼ .03, but not on the RGT,
F(1, 174) ¼ 1.90, p ¼ .17, partial h2 ¼ .01. Working memory
uniquely adjusted the scores on the maze task, F(1,
174) ¼ 8.65, p ¼ .004, partial h2 ¼ .05, and the RGT, F(1,
174) ¼ 12.46, p ¼ .001, partial h2 ¼ .07, but not on the NLCT,
F(1, 174) ¼ 2.27, p ¼ .13, partial h2 ¼ .01. Finally, pre-test
reading comprehension uniquely adjusted the scores on all
three post-test comprehension measures, with F(1,
174) ¼ 20.99, p ¼ .000, partial h2 ¼ .11, for the maze task,
F(1, 174) ¼ 39.19, p ¼ .000, partial h2 ¼ .18, for the NLCT,
and F(1, 174) ¼ 16.80, p ¼ .000, partial h2 ¼ .09, for the
RGT.1
Our fourth research question concerned potential relation-
ships between the effects (or lack of effects) of the interven-
tion on student outcome variables and the quality of the
implementation of the four instructional principles. As
summarized in Table 5, the results indicated that only the first
two ERCI principles were appropriately implemented. Based
on the observations, the teachers of the intervention classes
commonly initiated classroom dialogues to activate and
generate background knowledge, especially asking deeper-
level questions to students, explaining topic issues, and
refraining from just evaluating student responses as right or
wrong. Especially at the end of the intervention period,
deeper-level questions that required elaborated answers were
asked rather than factual or yes/no questions, and instead of
just evaluating student responses as right or wrong, the
teachers also acknowledged and tried to clarify the responses
and encouraged students to elaborate and reflect on their
statements. In addition, the teaching of all four comprehension
strategies, either individually or in combination, was observed
in the majority of the lessons, with the teachers especially
giving strategic reading as an assignment, reminding the
students to use the strategy, and guiding the strategy use of
individual students. While the use of individual strategies was
most emphasized at the beginning of the intervention period,
the use of two or more strategies in combination was most
emphasized at the end of the period. The teachers were seldom
observed modeling strategy use for students, however. As
intended, the four characters described earlier were used when
introducing and teaching the four comprehension strategies.
For example, the teachers dressed up as those characters when
introducing the strategies, and the classrooms contained
posters with the characters, who were also used on bookmarks
and cue cards that reminded students to use the strategies.
The teachers’ answers on the questionnaires seemed to
support the conclusion that the principles of relevant back-
ground knowledge and reading comprehension strategies,
respectively, were satisfactorily implemented. Thus, the ERCI
teachers reportedly put much emphasis on teaching students to
use their background knowledge and read strategically by
means of the four strategies during the intervention period.
Such practices were much less pronounced in the answers of
the control teachers, who expressed that they had not focused
particularly on students’ background knowledge activation and
use during reading, and also put much less emphasis on the
1
To examine whether the effects of the intervention differed between
classrooms, we performed two separate ANCOVAs, with scores on the post-
test strategy measure and the RGT, respectively, as dependent variables and
ERCI classroom as the independent variable. Covariates in the first analysis
were pre-test word recognition, working memory, and strategy use; in the
second analysis, covariates were pre-test word recognition, working memory,
and SRT scores. Neither results for strategies, F(4, 82) ¼ .73, p ¼ .57, nor for
the RGT, F(4, 81) ¼ .83, p ¼ .51, were statistically significant, indicating that
the intervention effects on students’ strategy use and reading comprehension (i.
e., RGT) that we report did not differ between classrooms.
 R. Andreassen, I. Bråten / Learning and Instruction 21 (2011) 520e537
Table 5
Implementation of the four instructional principles.
Principle Implementation Problem
Relevant background Appropriate
knowledge
Reading comprehension Appropriate Modeling
strategies
Reading-group Poor Small-group text
organization dialogues involving strategy
modeling and feedback
Reading motivation Poor Real world experiences
Choice of subtopics
Choice of texts
teaching of strategies, especially with respect to the strategies
of questioning and predicting.
The two last ERCI principles, respectively reading-group
organization and reading motivation, seemed to be rather
poorly implemented in the intervention classrooms.
The observations indicated that there was relatively little,
group-based cooperation between students during strategic
reading comprehension, with students more often reading the
text together in pairs or small groups but then continuing to
work on the text individually by, for example, generating
questions or summarizing content. Apparently, this situation
did not change much over the intervention period and was due
to disturbances and difficulty keeping students concentrated on
the task when trying to model strategies and give feedback to
each other. The answers to the questionnaires complemented
this picture. Although the ERCI teachers’ answers emphasized
reading-group organization more than those of the control
teachers, they also expressed that they found small-group text
dialogues difficult to manage because of students’ unsatis-
factory social skills and lack of independence. Particularly, the
shift from teacher-led classroom dialogues to student-led small
group dialogues were found to be problematic, with especially
academically less able and behaviorally more disruptive
students reportedly having problems functioning in reading
groups without more tutoring or scaffolding support. Finally,
the fourth principle, concerning the promotion of reading
motivation, was also not realized in the ERCI classrooms.
According to the observations, reading was seldom inspired by
real-world experiences related to the topics of study, and the
students were not allowed to choose among subtopics or texts
according to interests. Instead, one social studies textbook was
used as the sole reading material for all students, who always
read the same text at the same time. The different trade books
made available through the local library were thus not used in
the ERCI lessons, and the comprehension strategies were
always taught and practiced in relation to texts from the
textbook. This situation was confirmed by the ERCI teachers,
with information derived from the questionnaires also sug-
gesting that students in intervention and control groups did not
experience much difference with respect to this principle. In
fact, the teachers of the control classes used the same textbook
as the ERCI teachers as the only reading material in social
studies for all students during the intervention period.
533
Based on both observations and questionnaires, the same
pattern of implementation seemed to be occurring in all ERCI-
classes during the intervention. Thus, the first two principles
seemed to be satisfactorily and the last two principles seemed
to be poorly implemented in all five classrooms. This pattern
of implementation is consistent with the results regarding the
student outcome variables. More specifically, the imple-
mentation of the principles of relevant background knowledge
and reading comprehension strategies, respectively, seems
consistent with the findings that the intervention had a positive
effect on students strategic processing and comprehension
performance as measured by the RGT. At the same time, the
lack of implementation of the principles of reading-group
organization and reading motivation, respectively, seems to be
consistent with the finding that no effect of the intervention
was observed on reading motivation. Possibly, that these two
principles were unsatisfactorily implemented may also have
limited the effect of the intervention on comprehension
performance because self-regulatory use of reading compre-
hension strategies was not sufficiently promoted. We will
further elaborate upon possible relationships between imple-
mentation quality and student outcome data in the discussion.
4. Discussion
The present study contributes to the reading science liter-
ature by demonstrating positive effects of complex, explicit
reading comprehension instruction directed by regular
teachers after considerable professional development on
middle-school students’ strategy use and comprehension.
These findings partly confirm Hypothesis 1a. Consistent with
Hypothesis 1b, the findings also indicate that the effects of
reading comprehension instruction may depend on how an
intervention is implemented in classrooms, also pinpointing
which of the underlying theoretical principles that may
represent particular challenges for the teachers.
First, the improvement in students’ use of reading
comprehension strategies resulting from the intervention
seems to be in line with teachers’ adequate implementation of
the principles of relevant background knowledge and reading
comprehension strategies in the classroom. More specifically,
both the emphasis on activating and generating relevant
background knowledge and the explicit teaching of the four
merited strategies of predicting, questioning, clarifying, and
summarizing over a five-month period could be expected to
affect students’ use of deep-level comprehension strategies
positively. It should be noted, however, that our strategy
assessment tool focused more on strategy competence than on
awareness or self-initiation in the sense of Taboada and
Guthrie (2004), meaning that the students primarily demon-
strated that they had improved their ability to use strategies
well when requested to do so. Further development towards
becoming a self-initiated or self-regulated user of a repertoire
of comprehension strategies requires extensive training as well
as motivation to use the strategies. The implementation of the
third principle, reading-group organization, was supposed to
give the participants opportunities for extensive training by
534 R. Andreassen, I. Bråten / Learning and Instruction 21 (2011) 520e537
practicing the comprehension strategies in social contexts, and
the fourth principle, reading motivation, was supposed to
instigate a desire for text-based learning and comprehension.
The lack of adequate implementation of both these principles
may therefore have hindered students’ development towards
self-regulated use of comprehension strategies.
Second, the fact that no change was observed with respect
to reading motivation can be explained by the poor imple-
mentation of principles three and four. According to Guthrie
et al. (2004), providing collaboration in reading instruction
should be regarded as an important motivational practice with
the potential to promote, in particular, intrinsic reading moti-
vation. Moreover, catching students’ interest through real-
world experiences and then giving them ample opportunity to
work towards interesting and valued content goals by using
a variety of textual materials at their own discretion was
supposed to support the development of intrinsic motivation
for reading. Given the general decrease in academic motiva-
tion often observed over the elementary school years (Schunk,
Pintrich, & Meece, 2008), motivation-supporting components
of educational interventions seem especially needed. Middle-
school children, in particular, seem to prefer topics and texts
experienced as interesting and debatable for cooperative group
discussions (Alvermann et al., 1996). That such instructional
practices were mostly conspicuous by their absence in the
intervention classrooms makes it understandable that no
improvement in intrinsic reading motivation was observed.
Third, consistent with Hypothesis 2, the improvement that
we observed in students’ comprehension performance was
limited to a test where students read an expository text that
consisted of a longer passage, contained a larger proportion of
inferential questions, and was answered without access to
relevant text passages. This result seems reasonable given that
this text presumably represented a greater challenge and
required more deeper-level processing than the two other
comprehension tasks that we used (cf., Andreassen & Bråten,
2010). Accordingly, Afflerbach et al. (2008) emphasized that
strategies are needed when readers struggle with the text and
their usual skills cannot do the job. By demonstrating that
standardized tests much used to assess reading comprehension
in Norwegian elementary schools were not sensitive to
performance changes resulting from the intervention, our
study also highlights the importance of avoiding a “mono-
operation bias” (Cook & Campbell, 1979) when assessing the
effects of interventions to improve reading comprehension.
That said, the reason that the improvement in comprehension
performance that we observed on the most challenging task
was not larger may be related to the poor implementation of
principles three and four, presumably hindering the develop-
ment of self-regulated strategy use and intrinsic motivation.
Thus, some students may have been unable or unmotivated to
initiate and regulate their use of strategies to comprehend text
when not explicitly asked to do so. Of note is that reading
motivation may directly influence comprehension perfor-
mance in addition to its indirect influence as mediated through
the efficient use of comprehension strategies (Anmarkrud &
Bråten, 2009).
Because different reading comprehension measures were
used at pre- and post-test, we cannot entirely exclude the
possibility that the difference between the intervention and the
control condition that we observed on the RGT at post-test was
due to pre-existing differences in reading comprehension.
However, it should be noted that the pre-test measure that was
included as a covariate was a much used standardized and
validated test of reading comprehension (e.g., Elbro, Nielsen,
& Petersen, 1994), which has also been shown to correlate
substantially with the RGT (Andreassen & Bråten, 2010).
Moreover, students in the control group tended to score higher
on the SRT at pre-test that did students in the intervention
group, as was also the case on the pre-test measures of word
recognition and working memory. Taken together, this makes
it unlikely that there were pre-test differences in the favor of
the intervention group with respect to reading comprehension.
Moreover, it could be conceived as a threat to internal validity
that we did not ensure that the students in the control condition
were given the same amount of reading time as the students in
the intervention condition, which, admittedly, would have made
it easier to firmly conclude that it was the quality and not the
quantity of reading that made the intervention effective. It
should be noted, however, that in the intervention period, the
control group covered the same social studies topics by means of
the same reading material (i.e., textbook) during the same
number of lessons. There is thus little reason to believe that the
students in the control group were actually reading less that the
students in the intervention group, although the “ordinary
practices” that they experienced presumably involved more
whole class instruction where they were asked control questions
about text content after individual reading (cf., van Daal et al.,
2007; Rasmussen, 2003). Please also remember that teachers’
answers to questionnaires indicated qualitative differences in
that the intervention teachers were more concerned about acti-
vating and generating relevant background knowledge during
instruction, and that they also targeted strategic processing more
directly. Finally, it seems unlikely that merely a larger quantity
of reading instruction would result in a change (i.e., increase) in
strategic processing such as observed in this investigation
(Pressley, 2006).
The difficulty that the teachers experienced implementing
reading-group dialogues where students model strategy use
and provide constructive feedback to each other is certainly
not peculiar to Norwegian middle-grade teachers. As reviewed
by Dignath, Buettner, and Langfeldt (2008), interventions to
foster self-regulated learning at elementary school level may
even be less effective when students work together in pairs or
small groups during the intervention than when group work is
not used, with this negative effect displayed on measures of
academic performance, strategy use, and motivation alike.
Although there is a solid research base indicating that group
work can, indeed, improve motivation and make learning more
efficient (e.g., Guthrie et al., 2004; O’Donnell, 2006; Slavin,
1996), this also suggests that just having students sit
together in pairs or small groups may actually do more harm
than good. In contrast, effective group work probably requires
considerable commitment and skill, with both teachers’ and
 R. Andreassen, I. Bråten / Learning and Instruction 21 (2011) 520e537
students’ experience and instruction in small group coopera-
tive learning seemingly a key condition for success (cf.,
Dignath et al., 2008).
In particular, group work must be organized to insure that
group members explain or model to-be-learned material for
each other, a practice that was essentially lacking in our inter-
vention classes, because such cognitive processes seem crucial
to support learning during small-group discussions (van
Blankenstein, Dolmans, van der Vleuten, & Schmidt, in press).
The implementation of the last principle was supposed to
contribute to the development of intrinsic reading motivation,
that is, a will to read for one’s own sake (Guthrie & Wigfield,
2000; Ryan & Deci, 2000). That real-world experiences were
hardly used to trigger students’ interest to find out more about
the topic, and that students were not allowed choices between
subtopics and reading materials, seem consistent with the
finding that no change was observed with respect to intrinsic
reading motivation. Real-world experiences seem important
because they can initiate and frame students’ inquiry into
conceptual issues and make subsequent reading both interest
driven and concept oriented (Guthrie et al., 2004). Choices, on
the other hand, seem to promote intrinsic motivation to the
extent that they support students’ needs for autonomy,
competence, and relatedness (Ryan & Deci, 2000). This means
that all choices are not necessarily motivating and that
teachers should offer students choices that are adapted to their
interests and goals (i.e., autonomy supporting), do not cogni-
tively overwhelm students but allow them to demonstrate their
competence (i.e., competence supporting), and are not in
conflict with the values of significant others (i.e., relatedness
supporting) (Katz & Assor, 2007).
An important question concerns why the teachers partici-
pating in the intervention had difficulties implementing the
principles of reading-group organization and reading motiva-
tion despite professional development in the form of
researcherdteacher collaboration prior to the intervention.
There are several possible reasons for those difficulties. One is
that the researcherdteacher collaboration that took place prior
to the intervention should have been even more extensive,
including, for example, the use of films to illustrate explicit
reading comprehension instruction and frame discussions
about how underlying principles could be implemented in the
teachers’ own classrooms (cf., Anderson, 1992; Palincsar &
Brown, 1984). Another possibility is that the research-
erdteacher collaboration should have continued throughout
the intervention period. Thus, to manage more fundamental
changes in instructional practice, teachers may need guidance
and support with classroom implementation not only prior to
but also during the intervention, with this allowing for
continuous adjustments and fine-tuning of practices to
accommodate underlying theoretical principles (cf., De Corte,
2000). Moreover, as part of professional development, it may
be particularly important to discuss and, if necessary, try to
modify teachers’ attitudes towards certain instructional prin-
ciples and practices. For example, teachers’ attitudes towards
group work may not further the implementation of this prin-
ciple (Dignath et al., 2008). Also, teachers may be reluctant to
535
allow choices of subtopics and reading materials because they
take the traditional attitude that the textbook is the only
authoritative source on curricular content, and that working
with alternative topics and texts may imply that some of the
topics of the textbook are not sufficiently covered or that the
progression suggested by the textbook is delayed. Finally, to
insure better implementation of educational interventions, it
may be necessary that the school’s administration plays a more
active role. For example, De Corte, Verschaffel, and van de
Ven (2001) had principals participate in regular meetings
between researchers and teachers during their intervention to
improve reading comprehension strategies. Accordingly,
Hilden and Pressley (2007) concluded that administrative
support for changes in teaching practice is desirable.
In conclusion, this study highlights the need for imple-
mentation and process data in intervention studies to explain
their outcomes. Although we combined the use of classroom
observations and questionnaires, further research should
probably assess implementation quality even more broadly, for
example by also including in-depth interviewing of teachers
and students and video-based observations of classroom
instruction as well as group work. Moreover, implementation
data should not only be collected at the beginning and the end
but, ideally, in all phases of the intervention. That said, our
assessment of the implementation quality in this study clearly
indicated that teachers may need extensive preparation and
support to adequately implement new approaches to reading
comprehension instruction, with promoting productive group
dialogues and motivating choices representing particular
challenges. Still, much further research is required on how
teachers may be adequately prepared for and guided through
the implementation of research-based, explicit reading
comprehension instruction in the classroom.
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