How to assess and improve children's reading comprehension?

Reading comprehension is one of the most important skills children have to acquire during the final years of primary education. It is therefore unfortunate that many children have severe problems with a proper understanding of texts. To design methods that foster children’s reading comprehension, more information about the underlying skills and processes that are involved in reading comprehension is needed.
Prerequisites for reading comprehension are the accurate and fast reading of single words and knowledge of the meaning of these words. Also, working memory and reading strategies have been shown to be required for reading comprehension. However, since reading comprehension tests have been shown to differ in the underlying skills they depend on, the first aim of this dissertation was to further investigate whether the underlying skills of reading comprehension depend on the type of reading comprehension test. The second aim was to test whether the training of knowledge and use of reading strategies leads to improvement of reading comprehension. Because most Dutch fourth-grade children are able to read fluently and reading comprehension education regularly starts in second or third grade in the Netherlands, all studies in this dissertation focused on the reading comprehension of Dutch fourth graders from regular elementary schools.