How to Assess Reading Comprehension Skills
As one of the most important aspects of learning language, reading comprehension is indispensable to guide students of all ages toward academic success. Reading comprehension tests are the most common techniques of testing reading skills, as they are designed to reveal what the reader has taken away from various written materials and to gauge their overall reading level. While there are a multitude of assessment methods used today, the below steps should help you get started in providing accurate measures of reading comprehension.
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Instructions
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Before getting started, make sure that you have some idea of the student's reading level or projected abilities. For example, if a student is in fifth grade, prepare standard fifth grade reading assessment materials.
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Have the student read a passage from a book, a poem or an article that is written at her projected reading level. Next, decide which type of assessment will best fit the reading material and the student. This could be a question and answer test asking about what happened in the text or inferential questions about what was implied in the reading material. Other common assessments include exercises where words are left out of the passage, and the pupil must fill in the blanks with fitting words. For younger children, you might try having them read simple instructions such as "Raise your hand" or "Stand up" to test comprehension.
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Once the student has finished reading, administer the reading assessment, giving him a set amount of time to finish the test and answer any questions that he may have.
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Read over the work after the student has handed it in. You may assess her comprehension by giving scores in four different categories--poor, adequate, good or excellent, depending on how well she was able to summarize the ideas in the text and reflect on what she had read.
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Tips & Warnings
Other comprehension strategies include asking the student to draw a picture demonstrating what he has read, making a time line of important events from the text in the order of their occurrence, and multiple choice quizzes asking students to choose the most logical answer. Common questions for literature comprehension assessment exercises include "What is the text about?", "How did the writer make his or her point?", and "What is the main lesson of the story?"
Do not get stuck using only one type of reading material to test comprehension. Have students read a variety of texts to get a more balanced assessment. Do not send reading assessments back to the student without some type of encouragement or constructive criticism as to how they can improve. For instance, learners with weak vocabularies could focus on making lists of the words that hey do not understand.
