Comprehension
Slide 1: Comprehension  Assessment and Intervention
Welcome to this module on Comprehension: Assessment and Intervention. In this presentation, well explore what reading comprehension truly involves, how it develops, and most importantlyhow teachers can assess and support it in real classrooms. This session is designed especially for those of you who are just beginning your journey into teaching literacy. So lets dive in together!
Slide 2: Definitions  Comprehension
Reading comprehension is more than just understanding words. Its the active process of constructing meaning from text. Comprehension involves using background knowledge, vocabulary, and thinking strategies to understand, remember, and apply what is read. Its also deeply connected to students' ability to engage with texts across all subjects.
For example, Jabberwocky, a famous poem by Lewis Carroll, has a wide range of decodable but invented words.  I have used it for students to create definitions of the invented words, identify parts of speech, and illustrate it based on their conclusions.  Each of those tasks requires much more than merely decoding the text!  It is, by necessity, an active model of reading.
Slide 3: Georgia State Learning Standards Relevant to Comprehension
The Georgia Standards of Excellence emphasize the importance of comprehension across all grade levels. Standards include understanding key ideas, interpreting text structure, analyzing authors craft, and drawing inferences. These expectations help guide both instruction and assessment. Familiarity with your grade-level standards will help ensure your teaching is focused and aligned.  
These standards require critical thinking and analysis, complex processes that they will learn over time in your classrooms.
Slide 4: Role of Comprehension in the Reading Process

Comprehension is the ultimate goal of reading. Text is accessed as decoding helps students to read words and vocabulary helps them to recognize words and ascribe meaning. 

However, background knowledge is needed for students to make sense of what they read. 

We serve a role in building these foundational elements in addition to comprehension approaches and monitoring strategies.

Comprehension enables students to learn new information, think critically, and enjoy literature. Without comprehension, reading becomes a mechanical process, disconnected from meaning.
Slide 5: Simple View of Reading
According to the Simple View of Reading, comprehension is the product of two components: decoding and language comprehension. In other words, students need to both read the words and understand the ideas. Struggles in either area can impact overall comprehension. This model helps us think diagnostically about student needs.
Slide 6: Explicit and Implicit Questions

Different types of comprehension require different skill sets. Comprehension questions can be explicitwhere the answer is directly stated in the textor implicit, where students must read between the lines. 
Early readers tend to perform better with explicit questions, and will often answer by locating key words from the question within the text and copying the sentence that it appears in.  Which does not always answer the question, requiring some work with paraphrasing and question analysis!  These readers also need support with implicit questions, building background knowledge AND confidence needed to infer from the text. 
Both types of questions are important, but many students need specific instruction and modeling to understand how to answer implicit questions.  When you examine student performance on assessments, noting which kinds of questions students perform well or poorly on will help guide instructional decisions.
Slide 7: Drawing Conclusions and Making Inferences
Inference and conclusion-making are higher-order thinking skills. They require students to use clues from the text along with their own reasoning. If s99tudents do not have background knowledge or they do not have confidence that their knowledge is correct or of value, they will struggle with these questions.
Teaching students to make inferences is essential for understanding characters, author intent, and deeper meanings in both fiction and nonfiction texts.
Slide 8: Comprehension within Scarboroughs Reading Rope
Scarboroughs Reading Rope illustrates how different strandslike vocabulary, background knowledge, and verbal reasoningare woven together to support skilled reading.  And skilled reading IS comprehension.  Comprehension isn't one single skill. It's the result of multiple language and cognitive processes working together over time.  This complexity means that a breakdown in comprehension can be due to a gap or weakness in a number of different other skills.  Thus, whether providing instruction or analyzing assessment data, addressing comprehension performance may require assessing other skills.
Slide 9: Evidence-Based Comprehension InstructionTier One
In Tier One classroom instruction, all students should receive high-quality, evidence-based comprehension instruction. This means integrating multiple strategies such as questioning, summarizing, visualizing, and making connections. Explicit modeling, guided practice, and opportunities for discussion are all key to effective instruction.
Slide 10: Model Thinking and Meaning-Making
One powerful way to support students is to model your own thinking. Show them how you ask questions, monitor for understanding, and revise your thoughts while reading. Think-alouds make the invisible processes of comprehension visible to students. And skilled reading IS comprehension.  Use them regularly to demonstrate flexible thinking.
A side note heresometimes people who have struggled to learn a skill actually have an advantage in teaching, especially with think-alouds.  I have found that teachers who learned something naturally may have difficulty explaining how they came to an answer or built understanding.  Teachers who have had to really focus on learning can often better explain how they developed mastery.
Slide 11: Teach Text Features
Text featureslike headings, captions, diagrams, and bold wordshelp students navigate and understand informational texts. Teaching students how to use these features supports comprehension, especially in content areas like science and social studies. 
While many technology supports such as online reading practice are designed to be intuitive, I can attest that not everyone has the same intuitive understanding of technology.  This caveat is the same with reading texts, especially the informative texts that may be new to students.  Text features are a type of landmark to guide attention and progress whether that is on screen or in a physical book.
Chapter walks at the start of the school year or beginning of a unit to orient students to these signposts is one investment of time that can have significant academic benefits.  While these features are more permanent with printed texts, they are also key features within programs that you may use with students.  
Showing students habits such as how to preview a text, analyze images and data such as charts and graphs, and make predictions based on structure.  Once internalized, these procedures can be used across content areas and mediums.
Slide 12: Teach Writing Formats and Structures
Understanding how texts are organizedsuch as cause and effect, compare and contrast, or chronological orderhelps students anticipate whats coming and make sense of complex information. Use mentor texts and graphic organizers to help students internalize these structures.  
Teaching text organization serves a primary purpose in helping students to create schema as they read, which also serves to support students in remembering and processing the information.  It also helps them to internalize these patterns for application in their own writing. 
Slide 13: Use Graphic Organizers
Graphic organizers help students organize and visualize information. Tools like story maps, Venn diagrams, and sequencing charts can clarify relationships and support memory.  As with learning text patterns, these support students in constructing meaning both while they read and when reflecting on what they have read.   Once internalized, simple graphic organizers can be sketched and used independently to support learning.  
Choose the right organizer based on the text pattern, complexity, and comprehension goal.  For youngest readers, sequencing charts can help learn story grammar and support retelling.  As students (and their texts) mature, organizers that demonstrate the complexities of cause(s) and effect(s) will better serve the cognitive demands of grade level expectations.
Slide 14: Teach Visualization
I was astounded to learn that some readers do not automatically watch the movie when they read.  In my mind, I can see each scene and hear the voice of each character.  That is likely one of the reasons I can get so irritated when an actual motion picture does not match with my own imagination of a book.
But some students have to be explicitly taught how to see what they are reading.  For some learners, taking a break to sketch their ideas while they read is a welcome integration of creative activity.  More importantly, visualizing can be done when listening to a read aloud, and it does not require spelling skills.  For young readers, encouraging them to experiment with writing about their drawing and transcribing their ideas is a way to validate their thinking and to model orthography.
Visualization helps students create mental images as they read. This strategy supports understanding, especially when dealing with abstract or unfamiliar content. Encourage students to sketch, describe, or act out scenes to reinforce this skill.
Slide 15: Ask Questions of the Author (QAR)
Teaching students to ask questions of the author helps them think critically. The Question-Answer Relationship strategy, or QAR, teaches students to distinguish between questions that can be answered right there in the text and those that require author and me thinking. As mentioned earlier, both literal and inferential comprehension are important skills for readers to master.  
This strategy encourages readers to identify the purpose of questions and the sources for answers, encouraging returning to the text to verify information, especially for right there questions.  Even more importantly, identifying the need for active thinking for author and me questions supports students in using their background knowledge to make connections with the texts.
Slide 16: Ask Questions of YourselfMetacognition
If you have ever reached the end of a pageor a chapterin a textbook only to discover that your brain checked out a while ago, you already know the importance of self-monitoring while reading.
Strong readers monitor their own understanding. Teaching students to ask themselves, Does this make sense? or What should I do if Im confused? builds metacognitive awareness. These self-monitoring strategies are vital for lifelong reading success.  
Slide 17: Make Predictions
Prediction engages readers before and during reading. Asking students to make predictions can be part of a text walk before reading and can help students to activate prior knowledge to support comprehension.  
When students make thoughtful predictions, they are more invested in the outcome. Be sure to model how to revise predictions based on new information, reinforcing flexibility and comprehension.  
Slide 18: Teach Summarizing
Summarizing helps students identify the main idea and key details of a text. Its a high-level skill that requires synthesis and selective attention. Use graphic organizers, sentence stems, and modeling to support students in learning how to summarize effectively.
The link from Newsela provides additional information around teaching summarizing.  Newsela is another resource for free, timely content area texts at multiple reading levels.
Slide 19: Support Comprehension by Building Other Skills
Comprehension depends on fluency and vocabulary. Students who read slowly or struggle with word meaning will have difficulty understanding the text. Thats why its important to integrate instruction across all components of readingnot just comprehension in isolation.
Slide 20: Identifying Students Who Struggle with Comprehension

When students struggle, consider multiple factors: Is the text too complex? Do they have enough background knowledge? Are they reading silently or aloud? Comprehension varies based on these conditions, so we must look closely to identify the root of the difficulty.
That is to say, a breakdown in comprehension signals a need to look at the many elements that contribute to this skill.
Comprehension may be the goal, but succeeding in that goal requires learning all that comes before.
Slide 21: Diagnostic Practices
Informal reading inventories, observations, and comprehension interviews can help identify why a student is struggling. Often, comprehension problems are linked to earlier gaps in phonics, fluency, or vocabulary. Effective assessment helps us target instruction where it's needed most.
Slide 22: Informal Reading Inventory
The Informal Reading Inventory demonstrates the complexity of measuring comprehension, the variations of text complexity, and the importance of identifying appropriate materials to differentiate instruction to address students zones of proximal development.
As you remember from the start of the semester, these assessments begin with word lists to approximate students capacity for the passages.  These lists lack context for the words, so it  calls upon high-frequency word knowledge, decoding unfamiliar words, and vocabulary knowledge to determine when a word has been decoded correctly.
Slide 23: Informal Reading Inventory
Based on those results, passages are selected at the predicted independent, instructional, and frustration levels.  These should include both narrative texts and informational texts at each level.  Finally, having a few passages above and below the expected levels can accommodate performance variations.
It is also important to have extra passages available to ensure that you are prepared to administer readings about which the students have background knowledge.  The orientation questions before each reading determine if the student has adequate schema to make sense of the content in the passage; they also serve to activate prior knowledge.
While the student reads the passage, you will monitor fluency and error rates.  You may also choose to track errors to look for decoding patterns for remediation.  Like decoding, vocabulary, and background knowledge, fluency has a direct correlation to comprehension success.
After reading, students will retell the passage.  As with writing a summary, this practice helps students to solidify schema around the content.  Additionally, retelling will identify whether students are able to isolate main ideas, identify relevant supporting details, and maintain story order.  Each of those skills represents an opportunity for instructors to identify areas for improvement if needed.
Finally, students are asked questionsexplicit and implicitabout the passage.  At most levels, students are able to look back in the passage for answers.  Noting the strategies that students use and strategies they have not yet mastered provides another point for instructional interventions. 
This assessment integrates each of the subskills that impacts comprehension, providing a complete sequence of engagement and significant data for instructional decisions.
Having said that, there are many much shorter snapshot formative assessments that you might use in your classroom.  At the least, be certain that your student has adequate schema for the reading and that you do not conflate fluency with comprehension.
Slide 21: Tracking Comprehension Progress
Use think-alouds, journal responses, and comprehension questions to monitor progress. Analyze student responses to pinpoint misunderstandings. When used consistently, these tools provide valuable formative data to guide instruction.
Slide 22: Assessment Connections
Comprehension can be measured in diagnostic, formative, and summative ways. Formative assessments include questioning and discussion. Summative assessments include quizzes, written responses, and standardized tests. Using a range of tools provides a more complete picture of student understanding.
Slide 23: Next Steps
For this module, please complete the assigned readings, respond to the discussion board or attend our scheduled Zoom session, and take the comprehension quiz. These next steps will help solidify your understanding of how to assess and support reading comprehension in your future classroom.
Slide 24: Read and Consider
As you complete the readings, reflect on the discussion questions provided. What ideas challenged you? What will you apply in your teaching? Use the readings to deepen your understanding and prepare for our next session.

