Comprehension Processes: An In-Depth Assessment

    

     I have long been interested in the work of Judith Westphal Irwin, an expert on reading comprehension.  She divides comprehension into five dimensions or processes:  microprocessing (chunking individual words into phrases), integration (connecting sentences and paragraphs), macroprocessing (the main idea), elaboration (making more of a text), and metacognition (the ability to know that your thinking has gone awry and how to fix it). 
     This week I got an opportunity to put her ideas into practice.  I have a student, I'll call him Russ, who has not made any progress this year in reading comprehension.  His IRIs reveal he can decode and is fluent using on-grade-level materials.  I have had him in several skill-specific groups this year, but none has made any difference in his reading comprehension.  During Daily Five he frequently abandons books.  He doesn't like to read and has no favorite series, authors, or types of books.  Even books like Calvin and Hobbes and The Guinness Book of World Records fail to interest him.  These behaviors show he is not able to comprehend enough to keep interested in books.
     I decided I needed to assess Russ in more depth to discover what was standing in the way of him making progress.  I used Irwin's books (Teaching Reading Comprehension Processes and Promoting Active Reading Comprehension Strategies) to create an assessment checklist with one generic question that I could use for any book for each of the sub-skills she lists under each process.  Then I found an on-grade-level leveled passage for Russ to read.  This week I had him read and answer the question with me orally.  As I expected, Russ lacked sub-skills in many different comprehension processes.  However, the area where he couldn't answer any questions at all was macroprocessing.  He did not have any sub-skills in this area.  So this week I have instructed him individually in finding the main idea.  We started with identifying the topic sentence in paragraphs. 
     The assessment is definitely a work in progress.  It has made a difference in this student's education and I hope, with some work, it will make a difference in the lives of others.