Individual Differences

Reading involves a complex and ordered set of processes and behaviors that leads to a mental representation that conveys the underlying meaning of a text. Individual differences exist to the extent that readers are proficient in these processes and the extent to which systems are in place to support their occurrence. However, these processes and behaviors are not independent of one another. For example, working memory resources for student readers who are not proficient at lower-level aspects of reading will be consumed by these processes, which will compromise their ability to engage in higher-level processes. As such, it is critical for researchers and educators to identify and diagnose these multiple components of reading in order to help struggling readers.

Being able to identify students at risk of being poor readers is a primary goal of educators and researchers. Conventional wisdom tells us that students must be competent readers to succeed both academically and in society. Despite best efforts to help struggling readers during primary education, the RAND Report, Reading for Understanding, provided compelling evidence that there is a crisis regarding the literacy skills of students in the United States. The gaps in performance on measures of literacy competencies between students in the United States and other industrialized countries are widening. At the same time, the gaps between different demographic groups within the United States remain unacceptable. This crisis worsens when students reach secondary education, where texts become more challenging and expectations of gaining and using knowledge from text increase. Currently, there is little emphasis on teaching students to develop higher-level literacy skills that promote deep learning, leaving struggling readers at even greater risk academically.

Developing successful interventions to help struggling readers requires that one have an understanding of what is involved in reading and be able to identify a student's proficiencies in the various aspects of reading. Reading involves a series of cognitive processes and activities that can be conceptualized as [Page 512]ranging from relatively low level (e.g., phonological decoding) to high level (e.g., generating inferences based on background knowledge). These processes build upon one another, such that the products of one process must be available for the next process to occur. For example, a reader has difficulty accessing the potential meanings of a word unless he or she has accurately accessed the phonological sound of that word. Similarly, a reader cannot determine how a sentence is related to the prior text unless he or she has accurately understood the meaning of that sentence.

The goal of this entry is to discuss factors that influence individual differences in reading comprehension proficiency. Readers struggle for a variety of reasons. As Charles Perfetti argued, readers may struggle because they have not adequately developed proficiencies in lower-level language processes, such as phonological decoding, accessing the appropriate meaning of words, or understanding the grammatical relationships between words in a sentence. Although proficiencies in these lower-level processes are necessary for good comprehension, Jane Oakhill has argued that they do not guarantee it. That is, deep comprehension requires processes and strategies that are conceptually higher order, such as determining how a sentence is related to the prior text or generating appropriate inferences. Finally, students have a number of attributes that support reading comprehension, such as prior knowledge and working memory capacity. These “extratextual” factors can also contribute to individual differences during comprehension. This entry contains a discussion of lower-level reading processes, higher-level processes, postreading processes, and extratextual factors that contribute to individual differences in reading comprehension ability.

...