Reading Comprehension Links

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I am looking for resources to help me teach reading to 5th grade students that are deficient in reading and writing skills. Students have great difficulty with comprehension. They have difficulty identifying main idea, cause-effect, sequence, etc.

I would like a tool that will provide for assessment of problems and a tool that will provide for remediation of the problems. If you have any assistance please let me know asap.

I am working with urban, at-risk students.

Thanks,
EB

What kind of assessment tool are you looking for? If there’s a way to pull ‘em 1 at a time and do something like a Gray Oral Raeding Test you can get tons of good diagnostic info — but it takes some time. Also, its comprehension questions aren’t really that great for diagnostic just ‘cause they’re multiple choice so you don’t really get to know what’s going on in the kids’ heads. Another quick test I really like is the Diagnostic Spelling Potential Test, which really needs another name — it has the kids read words (separate score for immediate recognition and slowly-sounded-out words) and also spell words. I get a real handle on just how they’re processing htings at the word level with this. Comprehension is so much harder to formally assess so I usually do that informally with oral language, seeing if they know from inferences and where their vocabularies are.

I’ll bet you dollars to doughnuts that accuracy and fluency are behind the comprehension problems — they don’t know what all the words are, so they don’t understand what the passages mean. There are lots of good posts on this board about good reading programs (WIlson, PhonoGraphix, SRA). I have also put lots of comprehension materials on my site — just click under “reading comprehension.”

The most important thing, IMHO, is to do something consistently and thoroughly enough so that the kiddos can *see* their own learning and progress. So often they get one hit-or-miss program after another and even if it’s a good program, they never own their learning or practice the stuff enough to move on.