Reading Comprehension Flashcards

A 7th-grade student scores at the 98th percentile on a standardized word recognition measure and at the 55th percentile on oral reading fluency, yet earns a standard score of 71 on a reading comprehension battery. Listening comprehension testing yields a standard score of 69. According to the Simple View of Reading, which instructional target is MOST directly implicated?

Answer: Language comprehension, including syntactic knowledge, inferencing, and vocabulary depth

The Simple View of Reading holds that Reading Comprehension = Word Recognition × Language Comprehension. This student's word recognition is exceptionally strong, and fluency, while not at ceiling, is adequate. The listening comprehension score of 69 confirms that the comprehension deficit is not reading-specific — it reflects an underlying language comprehension weakness. Targeting decoding or fluency would not meaningfully address a language-level deficit.

During a diagnostic reading session, a student with strong literal recall fails to recognize that a pronoun in the third paragraph refers to a character introduced in the first paragraph, causing comprehension to break down. This failure MOST precisely represents a deficit in which type of inference?

Answer: Anaphoric inference

Anaphoric inferences are required to track referents (pronouns, noun phrases, ellipsis) across sentences or paragraphs. Failure to resolve pronoun reference is a classic anaphoric inference breakdown. Causal-bridging inferences connect causally related events within a text; elaborative inferences draw on background knowledge to enrich the text representation; predictive inferences anticipate upcoming content. Confusing these categories leads to misdirected intervention.

A CALT is comparing two 5th-grade students: Student A has a language-based learning disability with poor decoding but adequate listening comprehension; Student B has adequate decoding but significantly depressed listening comprehension. Both score similarly low on a standardized reading comprehension measure. Which statement BEST characterizes the appropriate differentiation of intervention?

Answer: Student A should receive decoding and fluency intervention; Student B should receive explicit language comprehension instruction targeting vocabulary, syntax, and inference

The Simple View of Reading identifies two distinct routes to comprehension failure. Student A's comprehension deficit is driven by weak word recognition — intervention should target decoding and fluency so language can access text. Student B's decoding is intact, meaning the deficit resides in the language comprehension component; phonological intervention would not address this. Comprehension strategy instruction alone is insufficient when the underlying deficit is either decoding or language comprehension.

A student reads a grade-level expository passage and, when asked comprehension questions, performs significantly worse on questions targeting cause-effect and compare-contrast relationships than on questions targeting descriptive or sequence content. Which instructional approach is MOST directly supported by this pattern?

Answer: Explicit instruction in expository text structure using signal words and graphic organizers aligned to rhetorical patterns

The pattern reveals that the student's comprehension breaks down specifically along rhetorical text structures (cause-effect, compare-contrast) while descriptive and sequential content is handled adequately — structures that rely less on inferring logical relationships. This profile points to a text structure awareness deficit. Explicit instruction in identifying signal words (e.g., 'consequently,' 'in contrast') and using structure-specific graphic organizers is the most directly targeted response. Reciprocal teaching is a valid general comprehension strategy but does not specifically address rhetorical structure awareness.

Research on the 'knowledge hypothesis' in reading comprehension posits that background knowledge influences text understanding primarily through which mechanism — and which implication does this carry for instruction of students with language-based learning disabilities?

Answer: Background knowledge enables readers to generate accurate predictive and elaborative inferences that fill unstated gaps in the text, meaning content knowledge must be built alongside comprehension strategy instruction

The knowledge hypothesis (articulated by researchers including Willingham and Recht & Leslie's landmark 'baseball study') holds that rich background knowledge enables readers to generate accurate inferences — both elaborative inferences that enrich the text model and bridging inferences that connect ideas not explicitly linked in the text. Students with language-based learning disabilities who have invested years in decoding intervention may have substantial background knowledge gaps; instruction must therefore address content knowledge building explicitly, not just strategy use.

A CALT is administering a think-aloud protocol with a 6th-grade student and notices that after reading a paragraph containing a logical inconsistency embedded between two sentences, the student continues reading without pausing, rereading, or commenting. When asked afterward, the student reports the passage 'made sense.' This behavior MOST precisely reflects a failure in which metacognitive process — and which intervention is MOST targeted?

Answer: Comprehension monitoring (error detection); intervention should include explicit instruction in self-questioning and fix-up strategies tied to detected breakdowns

The think-aloud reveals that the student is not monitoring for comprehension breakdowns — a metacognitive skill called comprehension monitoring or error detection. Skilled readers notice when meaning breaks down and deploy repair strategies (rereading, slowing down, seeking clarification). The student's post-hoc report that the passage 'made sense' confirms an absence of monitoring, not a working memory failure (which would manifest differently, e.g., forgetting earlier information) or a syntactic deficit. Targeted intervention involves teaching self-questioning routines ('Does this make sense? Is this consistent with what I read before?') paired with explicit fix-up strategy instruction.