Background: A significant number of secondary school students struggle with comprehending texts proficiently. Enhancing their reading comprehension requires knowledge about how this ability is related to various motivational and behavioural characteristics. The central aim of this study was therefore to investigate the (in)direct relationships between ninth-grade students' motivational (i.e., reading motivation and reading self-concept) and behavioural characteristics (i.e., reading strategy use, reading engagement and reading frequency) and their reading comprehension. Furthermore, differential relationships across educational tracks are investigated. Methods: A total of 2,485 ninth-grade students completed a standardised reading comprehension test and an online questionnaire to operationalise the motivational and behavioural reading variables. Data were analysed using multigroup structural equation modelling to study potential differential relationships across educational tracks (i.e., academic, technical and vocational track). Results: Motivational and behavioural characteristics were directly related to students' reading comprehension. Moreover, the relationships between motivational characteristics and reading comprehension were mediated by behavioural characteristics. As to differences across educational tracks, not all of the relationships were corroborated similarly for each track. Conclusion: Generally, the results emphasise the importance of considering the 'bigger picture', taking into account the respective contribution of both behavioural and motivational characteristics to secondary school students' reading comprehension and concurrently considering differences across educational tracks.

A significant number of ninth-grade students still struggles with proficiently comprehending texts. Moreover, their increasingly lowering motivation to read is alarming. Various educational interventions designed to enhance reading comprehension and/or motivation are available in the scientific field. However, a detailed description of its underlying principles is frequently lacking. This detailed description could provide genuine opportunities for replication, theory building, and dissemination into practice. Therefore, the main goal of the present study is to offer an analytic, rigorous, and detailed description of an instructional program aimed at fostering ninth-grade vocational students' reading comprehension, strategy use, and autonomous reading motivation, named ProjectExpert. The context, theoretical and/or empirical grounding, macro and micro-level design principles will be outlined, based on the framework of Bouwer and De Smedt (2018). ProjectExpert entails four design principles: (1) Text reading is goal-directed. (2) The instruction is embedded in a motivating learning environment rooted in the fulfilment of students' basic psychological needs. (3) By means of explicit strategy instruction students are taught to use a repertoire of cognitive and metacognitive reading comprehension strategies. (4) Students practice reading and applying reading strategies in heterogeneous pairs. Moreover, during the design, a stepwise procedure was adopted to guarantee the feasibility and usability of the design principles for this particular group of teachers and students. This stepwise procedure and the implications for the design of ProjectExpert are described in detail. Finally, the relational structure of the design principles and challenges related to implementing them into practice are discussed.

Because reading comprehension is an important skill that many students struggle with, there is an urgent need to foster it. Few studies have investigated effective comprehension practices within a response-to-intervention design. Therefore, this study investigated the impact of a Tier 1 intervention implemented for 10 weeks on 491 fifth and sixth graders’ reading comprehension, strategy use, and motivation by means of multilevel analyses. The Tier 1 intervention included four effective comprehension practices: strategy instruction, peer-mediated instruction, reading motivation promotion, and differentiated instruction. Results revealed no significant effects on reading comprehension, but experimental condition students increased significantly more on recreational autonomous and controlled motivation and on monitoring strategies than students in the control condition. Furthermore, struggling experimental condition students reported using significantly more monitoring and evaluating strategies than their counterparts in the control condition.