Following up on Beth’s message:
My son (5th grade) is making nice progress but he also lost ground in comprehension (last year- he virtually had made no progress in comprehension over the year) while gaining decoding skills and fluency. I am hoping that this is due to the fact that he simply is using all mental energy to read accurately and reasonably fast and hence is struggling with keeping up with the plot and visualizing what he is reading about (especially when the sentence’s length increases- he has poor short term/working memory). He has no problem with listening comprehension.
My son said to me (a day or two ago) that he understands much more once he reads the material second/third time.
Any comments from the professionals?
Re: Comprehension
Was this per the Woodcock Johnson III? If so, I am ready to write to those folks to complain about the comprehension subtest. There were several questions added when they revised the WJ, r to the WJ III. The new questions are, as far as I can tell, all duds. Almost no one I test gets them right, regardless of age and IQ. They are questions that start appearing when students get past the primary grade stages of reading (students at lower reading levels don’t generally get to them). This makes if most difficult to show gain in reading comprehension to parents.
I deal with this by administering an informal reading inventory. This is a more comprehensive measure. The student reads passages at specified difficulty levels. He is timed, scored for accuracy and asked to answer 10 comprehension questions that range from literal to inferential to vocabulary to evaluation. This provides me with the data that shows parents that, despite the bad test, there has been growth.
Re: Comprehension/WJ-III
yes Anitya- based on WJ-R. To be specific he had WJ-III in August and WJ-R in following May.
Thank you for shedding light on some source of this slow/lack of growth.
Nevertheless, his reading scores from WJ-III were quite consistent with reading at 3.2-3.4 grade level:
WJ-R Reading (from May 2002)
(%-ile) SS GE
Letter-Word ID (21) 88 3.4
Word Attack (35) 94 3.3
Passage Comp. (28) 91 3.4
Reading Fluency (21) 88 3.2
Gates-MacGinitie Reading (August 2002)
Vocabulary (35%ile) 4.2 (GE)
Comprehension (55) 5.3 (GE)
Total (46) 4.6
I do not know what is the difference between these two tests, but these were his results.
He had worked during the summer (tutoring plus reading fluencies at home), so I expect that there was some improvement of his reading due to this work.
I am told at school that his comprehension is good, although I think he is missing some details and some subtleties of “word play”, especially jokes. But, this is very much his profile- a non-verbal guy (although we see a lot of changes- esxactly what we were told we will see :-)))
With increased fluency he’ll have the time and energy to think, imagine and understand - if the vocabulary is there. If he’s working to read, then comprehension will suffer.
Advice: Have him read something “too easy” and question his comprehension and practice his comprehension at that level. Ken