Educators argue over what is considered reading. At an early level, reading is simply being able to verbalize what words are in a story, but others will argue that skill is simply pronunciation and the actual process of reading takes place by being able to understand what is in the text. No matter the argument, most educators will agree that the reason for teaching students to read is to teach them to comprehend information. Comprehension is creating meaning from a text. At the early elementary level, this is being able to state what was read and make simple connections. As students reach higher grade levels, particularly in middle and high school, comprehension involves making higher-level connections and analyzing a text to construct a deeper meaning.
Texts increase in difficulty as students advance to higher grade levels. A student who has not learned to comprehend a low-level will find it nearly impossible to comprehend a higher-level text. Reading is a process and it is only with practice reading and a scaffolding of texts that students develop strong comprehension skills. If a student's comprehension is assessed yearly or multiple times a year beginning in kindergarten, when problems arise it will be easier to help a student learn to comprehend at the appropriate grade-level. When students are assessed infrequently, it could be determined that an eighth grade student is only comprehending material at a third grade level. At that point, it is difficult to bring a student up to grade-level because most eighth-grade texts are written about a third-grade level and students will often feel embarrassed by lower-level texts and refuse to read them.
Informal comprehension assessment takes place on a daily basis in a reading or language arts classroom. Students read while being observed by the teacher and the teacher asks questions about the reading or has students construct simple responses based on the reading. This may be done with a whole-class reading or with each student reading a different text. Teachers should ask questions at various levels of thinking, from basic identification and summary questions to questions that require students to make connections or analyze the text. In cases where a student is unable to comprehend the text, teachers are able to implement fix-up strategies immediately to help improve comprehension.
Formal comprehension assessment generally takes on the role of standardized exams or formal exams in the classroom. Rather than assessing students on a book that was read and discussed in class, teachers should provide students with cold reads or new texts similar to a text read in class. On a standardized exam, all reading passages are cold reads and ask students questions at a variety of thinking levels. Formal assessments that use written responses instead of multiple-choice questions often do a better job of showing whether or not a student is able to comprehend a passage.