As all of the nouns, verbs, and related adjectives and adverbs in the passage were unfamiliar to me, I was unable to rely on semantic cues when reading the passage. I was able to answer the “comprehension” questions related to the reading by relying solely on syntactic cues; function words carried the reading passage and the sentence structure was predictable, making it easy to construct a response even though I had no idea what any of the other parts of speech meant.
I found myself going back to the passage and just repeating what it said with no understanding of meaning whatsoever. This tells me that questions related to a reading selection, like those on many students’ daily work and standardized tests can be answered correctly without actual comprehension. This really makes me rethink the kinds of questions I have my owns students answer after reading a passage or book.
Clearly, we should be asking students to respond by accessing higher level thinking skills such as inferencing, making predictions and connections, and interpreting what they’ve read. These kinds of tasks will demonstrate comprehension of texts. I will have to re-examine some of the work that I prepare for my students to better assess their comprehension.
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