Helping students develop proficiency in the use of interpretive comprehension skills such as are required for reading mathematics and science materials becomes both a means for continuation of technological progress and a dimension of the kind of literacy needed for living and working successfully. The development of these skills must be sought in two major ways: as an integral part of the development process of reading throughout the elementary years, and as an objective of instruction in mathematics and science courses during the high school years. Several specific skills of interpretive comprehension should be the focus of instruction as students read mathematics and science materials: (1) prediction of outcomes, (2) drawing conclusions, (3) making generalizations, (4)perceiving relationships, (5) identifying implied sequences of events and ideas, (6) selecting implied cause-effect relationships, and (7) summarizing information. Among strategies for improving reading comprehension are questioning and the structured overview, which requires readers to focus on relationships between prior knowledge and current information and involves a diagram conveying major concepts in a unit of learning. (HOD)