To increase reading comprehension, educators will need to provide early and sustained instruction in knowledge, vocabulary, inference generation, and comprehension monitoring. Key Points • • Improving adolescent reading comprehension will require a concerted effort from researchers, educators, and policy makers to forgo short-term gains on measures that tap low-level comprehension for long-term solutions that take years to develop. • • An early and sustained focus on developing background knowledge, vocabulary, inference, and comprehension monitoring skills is necessary to improve reading comprehension across grade levels. • • Despite decades of reading comprehension research, a limited amount of time is spent using evidence-based methods in classrooms. • • Education leaders will need to strengthen teacher preparation programs and professional development to ensure teachers are prepared to use evidence-based practices to meet the literacy needs of their students.

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This study utilized secondary analyses of a randomized controlled trial and investigated the extent to which prestest word identification efficiency, reading fluency, and vocabulary knowledge moderated the effects of an intervention on reading comprehension outcomes for struggling readers in sixth through eighth grades. Given that the experimental intervention included components that targeted word reading, reading fluency, and vocabulary, we hypothesized that students with lower pretest performance in those skill domains would benefit more from the intervention compared to students with relatively stronger pretest performance or students who received school-implemented (business-as-usual) intervention. Results indicated that pretest word identification efficiency and vocabulary did not moderate the effects of the intervention; however, moderation effects were observed for pretest oral reading fluency such that reading comprehension gains of students with lower pretest fluency were greater in the experimental intervention compared to students with higher pretest fluency or in the comparison condition. Reasons for the moderation effect are discussed. Findings underscore the use of moderation analyses when evaluating multicomponent interventions.

S chools are increasingly implementing response to intervention (RTI) or tiered systems of support in an attempt to more effectively and efficiently meet the needs of all students, especially those who are at risk for early reading difficulties (Samuels, 2011). Typical features of RTI include (a) providing comprehensive high-quality classroom instruction to students, (b) administering universal 25