The aim of the panel on reading comprehension, sponsored by the National Institute of Education Conference on Studies in Reading, was to determine the influence of intellectual factors, general experiences with the world, knowledge specific to the particular reading task, and general decoding skills to successful reading performance. In addition, an attempt was to be made to find ways to characterize the difficulty and other demand characteristics of written material and the task the reader is asked to perform. Finally, an attempt was to be made to integrate the results of the work just described with other theoretical and practical work in reading. The contents of the document are as follows: "Analysis of the Reading Demands in American Life," which lists several projects for the analysis of functional reading tasks; "Identification of Psychological Factors Involved in Reading Comprehension," which discusses the development of information-processing models for selected reading tasks; "Evaluating Individual Performance and Instructional Outcomes," which has as its aim the development of methods for evaluating understanding and models for individual testing; and "Comprehension and the Design and Evaluation of Written Material for Effective Human Use," which has as its aim the development of techniques to determine rational procedures for designing written material for various prespecified human uses. (WR)