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By Doug Buehl
What is your ‘measuring stick’ for improvement? How can you tell what you have been able accomplish? How do you chart your growth?
For example, how do your measure your improvement as a golfer? A bowler? A runner? What benchmarks help you gauge how you are progressing? Certainly, there is some "hard" data that you can analyze: overall scores or times as well specific indicators: feet achieved on drives, number of putts needed at a hole, instances in the rough, success with various combination of spares, and so forth.
But in all likelihood, you would also track valuable information that is related to actual performance of the activity: the follow-through on your swing, your form as a runner, your posture as a bowler. Knowledgeable others who watch you engage in the activity are particularly valuable in providing feedback on these facets of your performance. Eventually, you become skilled in monitoring these elements yourself as well.
A similar dichotomy can be noticed with reading comprehension. How can we measure the development of a reader? What indicators can we use to provide useful insight into a student’s progress? Historically, we have used reading tests of some dimension to gather such information. Students are provided with a series of passages at varying level of difficulty and are asked questions to evaluate their comprehension, often under timed conditions. State assessments seek this kind of data, as do the ACT and SAT.
But observational data, that feedback from a knowledgeable observer, is also extremely important in helping students progress as readers.
Over the past several years, these “Reading Room” columns have detailed a host of classroom strategies that embed comprehension instruction into the daily routines of teaching and learning. Although comprehension is a global result, a culmination of thinking on a variety of levels, we have examined specific facets of comprehension that deserved explicit instruction if students are to grow as readers of the different texts expected of them across the curriculum.
In particular, we have featured strategies that emphasize the following characteristics of comprehension: making connections to prior knowledge, generating questions about a text, using imagination to create mental images of the author’s words, making inferences to access implicit layers of meaning, determining what is important and what is background information, and synthesizing understanding so that it becomes personalized learning. When these characteristics of comprehension become a habit of mind for our students for whatever they read – a story, a newspaper, a Web page, a document, a magazine, a textbook – then we have the ultimate standard of measurement.
Step 1: Introduce the Traits of a Reader Rubric (Buehl & Stumpf, 2005) as an assessment tool during individual conferences and general conversations with students. The rubric provides language for tracking comprehension improvement with each of the proficient reader characteristics that are the building blocks of comprehension.
For each comprehension process, descriptive language focuses where an individual student might be rated on the continuum between (1) emerging abilities to demonstrate this characteristic and (5) advanced competence in applying this characteristic. The middle ground (a rating of 3) reflects that a student is able to engage in this comprehension behavior when guided by the teacher during a lesson that emphasizes this characteristic. A rating of (4) indicates that the student is beginning to employ this comprehension characteristic without being prompted by the teacher or a classroom activity. A rating of (5) shows that this type of thinking has now become a ‘habit of mind’ that the student automatically uses whenever engaged in reading.
Initially, few of our students will qualify as 5s as readers, but many will grow to 4s with our continuous instruction. A rating of (3) indicates that students will likely achieve success as readers if the lesson is constructed to support their comprehension, what has been referred to in previous columns as "scaffolded instruction." Many of the classroom strategies detailed in past “Reading Room” columns fit this category: students are "walked through" their comprehension and they are more likely to successfully learn from their reading. However, if students don’t progress from a rating of (3), they will continue to be dependent in our classrooms on carefully crafted lessons and teacher guidance. They will not transfer these gains to new situations and new texts on their own, and thus have not achieved independence as readers and learners.
Finally, a number of our students would initially be rated as 1s or 2s. A rating of (1) signals a struggling reader, a student who finds comprehension difficult even within the context as a well-designed lesson. This student needs more attention to modeling the comprehension process, more feedback, and a great deal more guided practice. A (2) rating reveals a reader who is making the jump, who sometimes handles the comprehension task during a lesson, but at other times does not. This student is on the cusp of being a successful classroom learner, but again, more modeling and guided practice will make the difference.
Step 2: The comprehension rubric is constructed to provide feedback and growth information to individual students as well as parents and caregivers. It is an excellent measure to be used during student conferences and meetings with parents and can be employed multiple times during the year during discussions on students’ development as readers. But it also provides the teacher with important information on instruction. As teachers chart the growth of a group of students, additional instructional needs may began to materialize. When a number of students still struggle to effectively generate their own questions, for example, the teacher has collected important classroom data that necessitates the need for more ongoing instruction and support
Step 3: As a regular dynamic of this assessment tool, students need to be asked to monitor their own comprehension. Students’ awareness of how they are progressing as readers, especially in terms of how they independently problem-solve their comprehension of challenging texts, is a crucial stage for developing these comprehension characteristics as habits of mind.
The comprehension rubric provides teachers and students with a ‘measuring stick’ for focusing on students’ growth as readers.
Further Resources:
Buehl, D. & Stumpf, S. (2005) Traits of a Reader Rubric. In 6-8 Literacy Notebook. Madison Metropolitan School District, Madison, WI.
Doug Buehl, WEAC member, Madison
Wisconsin State Reading Association.
drbuehl@sbcglobal.net
Posted April 11, 2008