Comprehension

When we think of reading, comprehension is usually the first thing that comes to mind. There are a lot of different types of assessments available to help you determine how well a child is comprehending their reading. Here are a few examples.

Quick Text Level Check-In
This is an informal type of assessment that can easily be used in the classroom as a useful way to monitor a child's comprehension of a particular text he or she is reading. The teacher can ask the child to silently read a portion of a text, and when the child is done the teacher asks he or she to tell about the part they just read. The teacher writes down the gist of what the child says and then judges the quality of the student's retelling as "limited", "some", "acceptable" or "strong". This assessment does not cover all areas of comprehension, so it is important to supplement with other types of assessments.

Retelling and Summary
These are oldies but goodies when it comes to comprehension assessment. I like them so well because they can be done on a minute's notice with little or no pre-planning. Retelling can really be tough for students. It is hard for them to not include every little piece of information from a story, but rather just focus on the key elements. However, this is a crucial part of becoming a fluent and successful reader, so the more you practice retellings and summaries in the classroom the better.

Instructional Approaches to Teaching Comprehension
QAR (Question Answer Relationships) is one tool that can be useful for teaching comprehension in the classroom. QAR is a method that students can use to categorize relationships between questions and where they can find the answers. Using QAR can help teachers monitor student's thinking and questioning as well as help the student consider the type of thinking they need to use for various questions.

K-W/E-L charts are an adaption of the often used K-W-L charts. In this chart the teacher has students generate what they already know about a topic along with what they want and expect to learn from the reading based on a teacher-led preview of the text. This is a great way to build background knowledge which is so important in reading. Finally, the children fill in what they have learned after reading the text.