,” like being able to determine the main idea of a passage. And for complex reasons, it’s generally assumed that most reading problems are comprehension problems, especially after second or third grade., comprehension “skills” are different from decoding skills. Rather than just getting better with practice, they can only develop alongside academic knowledge and vocabulary.
Even when armed with potentially useful information, schools may go in the wrong direction. In one first-grade classroom I followed, the MAP test had shown that students needed work on phonemic awareness and phonics. But the administration directed the teacher to address the problem by leading the kids through a “close reading” of a simple poem before they took the test again.
At another high-poverty elementary school, I observed a “data day,” when teachers pored over progress-monitoring results that supposedly measured students’ mastery of things like “making inferences” or “comparing and contrasting.”this,” one teacher moaned. They may have “known” it with one text, but that doesn’t mean they “knew” it with another, because these aren’t generally applicable skills.
Progress-monitoring that purports to measure abstract comprehension skills can have devastating consequences. It can obscure decoding problems that, left unaddressed,through high school and beyond. It can also deflect attention from the need to build students’ academic knowledge. State reading tests—and the National Assessment of Educational Progress , administered to a representative sample of American students every two years—also suffer from these defects. But at least they don’t directly guide educators to assign kids to “Tiers” that may just hold them back, or to spend more class time on “finding the main idea.” That could be changing, though.
Thank Geoffreypreud you for mentoring me and showing me the right and wrong, to support me in every manner possible, always made sure we get the best ROI.