The U.S. Department of Education has awarded six grants under the Program for Research on Reading Comprehension (PRRC) to support studies designed to provide a scientific foundation for improving reading instruction.

"For the past 10 years, our national assessment of educational progress has shown that significant numbers of children are unable to understand what they read at a proficient level," said U.S. Secretary of Education Rod Paige.  ???We must do better if all children are to get the world class education they deserve.  That is why our plans call for a significant investment in the new Program of Research on Reading Comprehension to be carried out by the department's Office of Educational Research and Improvement."

"The challenge is to establish a program of research that will answer questions about reading comprehension in a way that is translatable into practice," said Assistant Secretary for Educational Research and Improvement Grover "Russ" Whitehurst.  "I am pleased that new PRRC grantees can begin the long-term work needed to meet this challenge." 

Funding for the six grants will total $6,028,889 over three years.  Grants were awarded to:

CAST, Inc, $1,499,281

Primary Investigator:  Bridget Dalton

Study Title:  Reading to learn:  Investigating general and domain specific supports in a technology-rich environment with diverse readers learning from informational text 

Purpose:  to enhance our understanding of young children???s comprehension of informational text, and inform teachers??? practices, the design of texts and technology, and the design of websites

Eugene Research Institute, $1,019,249

Primary Investigator:  Scott Baker

Study Title:  Story read-aloud intervention for first graders

Purpose:  To add to our understandings about the relationships between children???s knowledge and use of comprehension strategies, their understandings of story-specific and strategy-related vocabulary, and the use of instructional discourse to foster complex thinking about text 

Ohio State University, $786,372

Primary Investigator:  Ian Wilkinson

Study Title:  Group discussions as a mechanism for promoting high-level comprehension of text

Purpose:  To identify converging evidence on the use of group discussions to promote high-level comprehension of text and to advance understanding of how teachers can implement discussions and assess their effects in ways that are sensitive to instructional goals

University of Colorado, $799,884

Primary Investigator:  Thomas Landauer

Study Title:  Research on and with novel educational technologies for comprehension 

Purpose:  to evaluate novel computer managed activities that engage, assess, and exemplify precise use of words in connected discourse

University of Memphis, $1,425,200

Primary Investigator:  Danielle McNamara

Study Title:  Coh-metrix:  Automated cohesion and coherence scores to predict text readability and facilitate comprehension

Purpose:  to improve reading comprehension in classrooms by providing tools to improve textbook writing and more appropriate match textbooks to the intended students 

University of Pittsburgh, $498,903

Primary Investigator:  Charles Perfetti 

Study Title:  Word learning and comprehension:  New laboratory approaches and classroom studies

Purpose:  to find out what influences how well word meanings can be learned from context, and how texts with unknown but familiar words might differ from texts with truly unfamiliar words; also, to determine the effect of increased instruction on the outcomes of the instruction embedded in the Text Talk teaching approach

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