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.

First Attempts at a True RtI Model

A few weeks ago, I found this video via Pinterest.

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-NsyvFN8kX8&feature=youtu.be

I love how everything in the binder was organized and the strong link between assessment and instruction.  However, the binder was designed for much younger students (K-2) with reading difficulties (phonics, accuracy, fluency) that lend themselves to keeping track of data in this way.  My students are entering fifth grade, and those that I am most worried about have comprehension issues.  Comprehension, as a skill, does not lend itself to numeric data.  As I saw it, there were three barriers to implementing something like this that I needed to overcome:
1) a form to assess and graph progress weekly
2) 20-30 one-page passages, per reading level, to assess comprehension each week for twenty to thirty weeks
3) a quick, consistent, easy-to-administer comprehension check that can be converted into a number to be graphed 
4) multiple ways to teach comprehension skills
I think I have finally created this and I share my first attempt here.  Feedback welcome!
Intervention Tracking Sheet
My intervention tracking sheet is a bit more generic and doesn't contain the "digging deeper" assessments that are part of the video, since I don't have them.  I will make do with all the other data I have, which is recorded in other places.  There is a nice big space to graph weekly assessments.  Here is the link to the document in Google docs:

https://sites.google.com/a/sau61.org/mrsjones/Reading%20Progress%20Monitoring%204%20BLOG.docx?attredirects=0&d=1

"Dedicated" Passages to Assess Comprehension
I purchased Daily Reading Warm-Ups from Teacher Created Resources with 150 passages each.  I purchased a third grade, fourth grade, and fifth grade version.  Expensive?  Yes, but it is worth the price to not have to create passages from scratch.  I can just hand them the book- no photocopying needed.  These book will NOT be used for instruction, only assessment.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1420634917/ref=oh_details_o00_s00_i02

Numeric Value for Comprehension Check
I decided to use retells as my comprehension check.  They are consistent and easy to administer.  I created a form that assigns a numeric value for each element of a retell and put this in a chart form.  It is available on Teachers Pay Teachers via this link:

http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Scoring-a-Retelling

Multiple Ways to Teach Comprehension
For a long time I have been influenced by the work of Judith Irwin in reading comprehension.  I will be using her "seven dimensions" of comprehension to guide my instruction.

http://www.amazon.com/Promoting-Active-Reading-Comprehension-Strategies/dp/0137312415/ref=cm_cr-mr-title

My plan is to teach strategies for one "dimension" at a time using Irwin's resource book, assessing the results in overall comprehension weekly. If a student does not make progress for two weeks in a row, I will switch to a different "dimension" and set of strategies.  So it should take a maximum of 14 weeks (or about one trimester) to be able to find the dimension that the child is having difficulty with.
For more information about data-based decision making, read the article:  "Tier III Assessments, Data-Based Decision-Making, and Interventions" by Kristin Powers and Arpita Madal from California State University, Long Beach.

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