Within the context of comprehension and education, there has been a heavy emphasis placed on an individual's ability to construct a coherent and elaborated mental representation of text content. Previous research has aimed to establish the theoretical basis behind the comprehension process, as well as the most effective interventions for improving comprehension skills and strategies. A major challenge lies in the task of operationally defining the component processes that contribute to text comprehension. A number of frameworks have been proposed to delineate the differences between lower and higher level cognitive processes and to map these various levels of thinking onto the task of reading comprehension. However, the task of mapping such frameworks on to the comprehension process proves difficult, given the influences of various domains as well as the stages of development. One particularly salient aspect of implementations of hierarchical frameworks is that they are primarily based on overt behaviors, tasks, and performance assessments. This allows educators to directly observe these behaviors and then intervene when students are not engaging in the desired behaviors. It provides tractable goals for encouraging higher level learning, whereas it would likely be futile to monitor and modify students' actual cognitive processes during classroom activities. Our argument, however, is that researchers and educators should be cautious when assuming that certain cognitive processes consistently underlie particular types of learning activities, as overt behaviors do not always reliably indicate the processes in which students are engaged. A student may engage in a task considered to be lower level, but engage in higher level processing, and vice versa. These interactions between reader, task, and outcomes complicate simplistic interpretations of higher level processing. Given the potential hazards of labeling cognitive processes or learning objectives as lower and higher level, one solution would be to throw out the terminology entirely. However, successful reading comprises a multitude of skills and strategies from the basic (letter recognition) to the complex (self-monitoring), such that having hierarchically defined distinctions is clearly useful when building comprehension models, developing assessments, and designing and evaluating classroom activities. Hence, terminology related to higher order thinking is useful on various levels. One of our primary goals is to convince readers to avoid or temper the conflation between learning processes, tasks, and outcomes--particularly if the ultimate research objective is to understand the optimal conditions for enhancing student comprehension and learning. Ultimately, greater consideration must be turned to individual differences among students, and how students' abilities, goals, and dispositions differentially affect comprehension. Clearly the last few decades of research in the area of comprehension have elucidated a good deal in this respect. But, there remain a multitude of questions to answer, particularly in regard to how to foster and how to scaffold students toward higher order thinking.