This article presents an overview of a conceptual framework designed to help reading professionals better understand what their students are facing as they learn to read in alphabetic writing systems. The US National Reading Panel (NRP) recommended five instructional components for improving reading outcomes but presented these instructional components as a list without explicitly addressing their interrelations, either in terms of instruction or cognitive development. In contrast, the Cognitive Foundations Framework offers a description of the major cognitive capacities underlying learning to read and specifies the relationships between them. The central claim of this article is that what is needed to help intervention specialists achieve better outcomes is a clearly specified conceptual framework of the cognitive capacities underlying learning to read that provides the basis for an assessment framework that is linked to evidence-based instructional strategies for addressing the individual literacy learning needs of students.