Generally, experts agree on what good readers do to comprehend text—they connect new text with past experiences, interpret, evaluate, synthesize, and consider alternative interpretations. Yet, traditional measures of reading comprehension only provide a general indicator of how well a student understands text. They do not provide information about how the student uses cognitive and metacognitive processes or explain why a student may be struggling. This article discusses various traditional and innovative reading comprehension assessment measures, including standardized norm-referenced tests, informal reading inventories, interviews and questionnaires, anecdotal records and observations, oral retelling, freewriting, and think-aloud procedures. For each technique relative strengths and weaknesses are described.
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