Reading Comprehension Flashcards

A 4th-grade student scores at the 52nd percentile on a standardized word recognition measure and at the 58th percentile on oral reading fluency, but scores at the 11th percentile on reading comprehension. Listening comprehension testing reveals performance at the 9th percentile. According to the Simple View of Reading, which profile BEST characterizes this student?

Answer: Specific Comprehension Deficit (Poor Comprehender) driven by a language comprehension weakness

The Simple View of Reading holds that Reading Comprehension = Decoding × Language Comprehension. This student's decoding is intact (average word recognition and fluency), yet both reading AND listening comprehension are impaired. When listening comprehension mirrors poor reading comprehension, the deficit lies in language comprehension—not decoding. This is the hallmark of a Specific Comprehension Deficit (SCD). A mixed disability would require decoding deficits; dyslexia would present with poor decoding; processing speed alone would not depress listening comprehension equally.

While reading the sentence pair 'Maya dropped her phone into the toilet. The screen went completely black,' a struggling reader fails to infer a causal-temporal connection between the two events, treating them as unrelated facts. This failure MOST directly disrupts which type of inference and which aspect of comprehension?

Answer: Bridging (coherence) inference; disrupts local text coherence

Bridging inferences (also called coherence or backward inferences) connect adjacent propositions to establish WHY or HOW one event relates to another—they are necessary, not optional, for local coherence. Without them, the reader cannot link the two sentences into a single coherent event. Elaborative inferences add optional background information (e.g., imagining the water splashing); predictive inferences anticipate future events; evaluative inferences concern author choices. Local coherence specifically refers to sentence-to-sentence integration.

A classic line of research (typified by Recht & Leslie, 1988) demonstrated that students classified as 'poor readers' who possessed extensive domain-specific background knowledge outperformed 'good readers' with low background knowledge on a content-area reading comprehension task. For a CALT designing intervention, what is the MOST clinically significant implication of this finding?

Answer: Reading comprehension assessments conducted in unfamiliar content domains may systematically underestimate a student's actual comprehension capacity

The background knowledge research reveals that comprehension performance is heavily domain-dependent. A student assessed exclusively on unfamiliar topics (e.g., cricket, organic chemistry) may score far below their true comprehension capacity, yielding a misrepresentative profile. This has direct implications for CALT assessment selection: using only one genre or one content area risks misidentifying a knowledge gap as a comprehension disability. The other choices misapply the finding—decoding remains foundational; fluency instruction is still well-supported; and background knowledge does not reroute phonological processing.

During a structured assessment, a student reads aloud the sentence 'The librarian shelved the books before she borrowed them from the library' without pausing, re-reading, or indicating any awareness that the sentence is semantically anomalous. This behavior MOST strongly indicates a deficit in which comprehension-related process?

Answer: Metacognitive comprehension monitoring — the ability to detect when meaning breaks down

Comprehension monitoring is the metacognitive process by which a reader detects a mismatch between incoming text and their evolving mental model. A semantically anomalous sentence (shelving implies possessing books, which contradicts borrowing them afterward) should trigger a 'click of comprehension failure.' Failure to notice this is the defining symptom of poor comprehension monitoring, not a vocabulary or decoding problem—the student demonstrated adequate word recognition. Syntactic difficulty would manifest as slower or fragmented reading, not as fluent, unmarked passage through a logical impossibility.

A student with developmental language disorder (DLD) demonstrates disproportionate difficulty understanding the sentence: 'The manager that the employee who won the award praised resigned.' Compared to a right-branching equivalent, this sentence taxes comprehension because it requires:

Answer: Resolving a center-embedded relative clause, requiring the temporary suspension of the main clause in working memory while processing a nested subordinate clause

Center-embedded relative clauses interrupt the main clause mid-processing: 'The manager [that the employee [who won the award] praised] resigned.' The reader must hold 'The manager...' in working memory, process the embedded clause 'the employee who won the award praised [him],' resolve the referent, and then complete the original main clause. Students with DLD have documented working memory and syntactic processing limitations that make center-embedding disproportionately costly compared to right-branching structures (e.g., 'The employee praised the manager, who resigned'). This is not a passive voice, negation, or topicalization phenomenon.

A student correctly answers all literal and locally-inferenced comprehension questions about a multi-paragraph expository text but fails every question requiring integration of information from non-adjacent paragraphs. According to Kintsch's Construction-Integration model, this dissociation MOST likely reflects a breakdown at which level of text representation?

Answer: The situation model level — a unified, globally coherent mental representation of the text is not being constructed

In Kintsch's Construction-Integration model, readers build three levels of representation: (1) the surface code (verbatim wording), (2) the propositional textbase (local idea units and their relations), and (3) the situation model (an integrated mental simulation of what the text is about, incorporating world knowledge and cross-text integration). This student's success on literal and locally-inferred questions shows intact surface code and propositional textbase processing. Failure on globally-integrated questions—requiring connections across non-adjacent paragraphs—points specifically to a situation model deficit. The situation model, not the macrostructure or textbase alone, is the locus of global coherence.