When should assessment be used in reading comprehension?
Assessment is a crucial aspect of teaching and learning. Assessment practices allow students to communicate what information they understood and retained. Assessment should be used as a starting point, ongoing and built in (Winch, Johnston, March, Ljungdahl, & Holliday, 2010). By using a variety of assessment methods when evaluating a students reading comprehension, helps to reflect on the teaching strategies used. Therefore, assessment can help determine the planning of future lessons, monitor student progression and reflect upon student learning to determine how outcomes can continuously improve.
There are many different assessment methods that can be used. However, it is important that you are not just testing how well a student reads. Listed below are a few assessment methods that we believe are beneficial when evaluating how well a student has comprehended a text:
There are many different assessment methods that can be used. However, it is important that you are not just testing how well a student reads. Listed below are a few assessment methods that we believe are beneficial when evaluating how well a student has comprehended a text:
Written Tests:
Once a student has read a text, there are many different resources of activities sheets that can be completed afterwards to see how well a student has gathered meaning from a text. 'Questions can be constructed to reflect literal comprehension or inferential comprehension skills' (Winch, Johnston, March, Ljungdahl, & Holliday, 2010, p. 143), and can provide helpful details of how well a child understood the text. NAPLAN is an example of how a written comprehension test is used. |
Read and Retell:
This is a very useful assessment as it can be done either written, orally or in pictures. It is helpful as it shows you the key ideas that students grasped from the text.
This is a very useful assessment as it can be done either written, orally or in pictures. It is helpful as it shows you the key ideas that students grasped from the text.