Supporting Students Reading Complex Texts: Evidence for Motivational Scaffolding

The Common Core State Standards (CCSS) require students to read grade-level text with “scaffolding as needed.” The current study examines the effectiveness of interactional scaffolding, which is responsive in-person support an expert provides to a novice reader in order to support the reader’s comprehension during reading instruction, for 213 young adolescents learning within a four-lesson small-group guided-reading intervention (N = 196 instructional sessions). The intervention taught students, many of whom were reading below grade level, to use comprehension strategies as they read CCSS-style complex texts. To support student reading, tutors were encouraged to choose from a set of interactional scaffolds to contingently respond to student needs as they arose. Multilevel regression indicated that motivational scaffolding—but not vocabulary, fluency, comprehension or peer scaffolding—predicted growth on standardized reading comprehension. Implications for research and practice are discussed.