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Identifying Robust Variations Associated With Reading Comprehension Skill: The Search for Pressure Points

ABSTRACT This special issue of JREE features studies from three of the teams (Barnes, Stuebing, Fletcher, Barth, & Francis; Language and Reading Research Consortium, Arthur, & Davis; LaRusso et al.) supported by the Institute of Education Sciences—Reading for Understanding Research (RFU) Initiative. Each study examined the importance of comprehension-related variables (i.e., academic language, perspective taking, complex reasoning skill, suppression, and response to instructional dosage) in developing readers. In this commentary we apply Perfetti and Adlof's (2012) concept of comprehension-related pressure points to help us assess whether the size of relation between the comprehension-related variables and reading comprehension skill are large enough to be of practical significance for assessment and intervention. In general, we conclude that none of the comprehension-related variables investigated in the special issue meet the criteria for inclusion as a pressure point. However, we caution that decontextualized assessments of potentially important comprehension-related skills applied as predictors to generic passage variance without concern for important reader-by-text interactions may result in underestimates of the importance of reader characteristics in certain texts.