Abstract
Reading comprehension instruction is as an important part of the school curriculum, because reading comprehension is a significant foundational skill for many academic subjects (Edmonds et al., 2009). There are potentially serious implications for students’ educational and career success when they have notable learning difficulties in reading, such as being retained a grade in school, dropping out of high school, or obtaining a minimum-wage occupation (OECD, 2014). The task of understanding, summarizing, or learning from complex reading material is increasingly difficult in middle school (Kelley et al., 2010). The goal of understanding text can be particularly challenging for middle school students with learning disabilities. Given these statistics, without effective instructions or interventions to support reading for understanding, reading difficulties at the middle school level can lead to poor outcomes for students with learning disabilities (Edmonds et al., 2009). This project consisted of a literature review on research supporting reading comprehension for young adolescents and evidence based practices for providing reading comprehension instruction. The literature reviewed was used to develop the ARC: A Reading Comprehension Curriculum for Young Adolescents curriculum, a research-informed tool designed to strengthen reading comprehension skills in middle school students (i.e., 6th-8th grade students). This project serves as an additional resource for teachers, intervention specialists, as well as school psychologists to remediate the weaknesses in reading comprehension.