hello hello hello welcome to assessing preventing and overcoming reading difficulties a professional learning series presented by david kilpatrick sponsored by the exceptional student services unit and created in collaboration with specific learning disability specialists jill marshall and veronica fiedler the colorado department of education's vision is that all students in colorado will become educated and productive citizens capable of succeeding in society the workforce and life the mission of the cde is to ensure all students are prepared for success in society work and life by providing excellent leadership service and support to schools districts and communities across the state this series is designed for use in multiple ways you can complete all 13 modules participants who engage in all 13 modules will be provided a comprehensive learning experience encompassing research impact and critical elements of assessing preventing and overcoming reading difficulties you can complete individual modules participants may view a session or sessions for specific information and guidance on topics related to assessing preventing and overcoming reading difficulties this format is ideal for short professional development opportunities for example during an impact team meeting or professional learning community you can also complete this as a book or chapter study participants may view all or part of the series as a tandem companion or supplemental resource for supporting a study of the book the essentials of assessing preventing and overcoming reading difficulties module 9 assessing reading comprehension and related skills session 1 reading comprehension tests my name is david kilpatrick and i'm your presenter for these webinars we have 13 separate modules in these webinars and many of them have multiple sessions the idea behind these webinars is to help connect educators educational professionals with the reading research to assist with assessing preventing and overcoming reading difficulties here's an overview of the 13 modules and we are now beginning module 9. module 9 has two sessions the first is on reading comprehension tests as a result of this session participants will be able to identify different ways that reading comprehension can be evaluated based upon the nature of those reading comprehension tests and to help interpret reading comprehension within the context of a student's overall reading skill profile recall from module 3 a simple view of reading the simple view of reading says that reading comprehension is the direct product of word level reading skills and language comprehension skills so if you can read the words and you understand the language in which those words are written in you will comprehend what you read in this module reading comprehension is going to be addressed in two ways first of all we're going to talk about direct attempts to assess reading comprehension through classic reading comprehension tests and subtests that's what this session is about next session we're going to talk about evaluating the language related skills that go into language comprehension that in turn go into reading comprehension let's do a quick review from the third module of the different types of reading difficulties there are three basic types of reading difficulties many variations within those of course but dyslexia represents poor word level reading but there's adequate language comprehension hyperlexia refers to a situation which the word level reading is fine but the oral language is very weak and so the child is able to read work read words and passages above and beyond his or her comprehension level and then the combined type is a situation in which a child has problems with word level reading and with poor oral language the reading comprehension test that we're going to focus on in this module will pertain to the hyperlexic and combined types of reading difficulties as well as english learners because english learners of course do not have the same level of language development as native speakers for the most part and as a result they often have the either hyperlexic or combined pattern look at all the different ways that reading comprehension has been evaluated silent or oral reading followed by an examiner's verbal questions silent or oral reading followed by a student reading multiple choice questions or by a pointing response or by a student acting out the instructions not too many tests that do that but some of the early items on the ktea have done that in the past and also the closed procedure the closed procedure close is a shortened version of closure the idea is you have a sentence and there's a blank and you have to fill in the blank and if you understand the sentence you can fill in the blank with a proper word then there's time sentence reading where there's a simple yes no comprehension question and another type is story retell so there's a wide variety of formats for assessing reading comprehension and in any given one of these the tests might involve reading a single sentence many of the closed procedure tasks and the time sentence reading tasks are just one sentence some of them may be lengthy passages they may include narrative or expository text it's important to realize that not all reading comprehension tests are going to yield equivalent results when we look at word reading tests they intercorrelate pretty highly they might range from a positive 0.78 to a positive 0.92 and if you know anything about correlations that's pretty strong reading comprehension tests on the other hand have much more modest intercorrelations they're going to range from about 0.3 to 0.7 what this means is that our impressions of a child's reading comprehension based upon any given reading comprehension subtest may have a lot to do with that specific subtest now there are several reasons why we have different outcomes among the different tests think about the differences in format that was just mentioned researchers have also identified that the length of the passage plays a big role in children's response tests that have very brief passages maybe just a single sentence they correlate more strongly with the word reading side of the simple view equation tests that have longer passages tend to correlate more strongly with the language comprehension side of the simple view equation and what researchers suggest based on these results is that if you have a briefer passage it's hard to gain meaning when a few key words you might not know it's hard to figure out the rest of the sentence but if you have a longer passage there's more available to you to figure out what's going on it's important for us to acknowledge that we can have differing outcomes based upon the format and passage length of the reading comprehension test that we're using as mentioned previously word reading skills interact with passage length language comprehension interacts with passage length and we need to realize that these these interact with each other to try to get a good sense of what is the child's reading comprehension really like ideally you'd want to use more than one format if you use one format your results may be format specific but if you use multiple formats and the results are consistent with the given child you're going to feel more confident that you have a sense of the child's reading comprehension skills but what i'd like to emphasize and this is going to be talked about in the next session i'd like to emphasize that we need to also examine language skills to help understand why the child or even if the child is struggling in reading comprehension and to look at word reading skills so we have to have a good sense of what the word reading skills are like and a good sense of what their language skills to properly interpret any given reading comprehension subtest now the best practices with reading comprehension assessment at least with reading comprehension tests can be very time consuming because if you want to address the issue of subtest reliability you might want to give two tests of the exact same format because if you give two tests with different formats you're really not addressing the subtest reliability issue and if you do that you realize that this could be very time consuming with word level reading tests they're very brief but with reading comprehension tests many of them can be time consuming in summary reading comprehension tasks vary by format and length of individual test items and format and length both affect the outcome so they're also affected by word reading skills and oral language comprehension skills and best practices would involve a use of multiple reading comprehension testing format but also best practices involve interpreting reading comprehension subtests in light of a student's word reading skills and in light of their oral language comprehension skills what reading comprehension subtests do you use how might you use or interpret them differently now that you know some of the information presented in this session next up we're going to look at language comprehension and related tests module 9 assessing reading comprehension and related skills session 2 language comprehension and related tests hello this is david kilpatrick your presenter for the 13 on demand webinars and as a result of these webinars the hope is that educational professionals will learn more about the reading research as it pertains to assessing preventing and overcoming reading difficulties here's an overview of those 13 modules for each of the webinars and we're going to be working on module 9. this particular session is the second session in module 9 looking at language comprehension and related tests as a result of listening to this webinar participants will be able to identify language skills that support reading comprehension and select and interpret language related tasks to further understand the source of reading comprehension difficulties recall once again the simple view of reading which proposes that reading comprehension is the product of word level reading and language comprehension skills if language comprehension skills is one of the two broad skill areas that goes into reading comprehension then language comprehension has to be an important source of information when we evaluate children for reading comprehension problems and this would influence not just assessment but also instruction and intervention poor language comprehension is the basis for two types of reading difficulties hyperlexia in which children do not understand what they're reading and the combined type in which children struggle in understanding what they read but also struggle with reading the words there are a number of different skills that influence language comprehension which in turn will influence reading comprehension first of all would be vocabulary knowledge if you don't understand the words and have given communication whether it's written or oral you're not going to comprehend that communication very well grammar and syntax background knowledge constructing a mental model which is not really a separate language skill but it is related to language because numerous language functions help promote the construction of a mental model inferencing working memory attention and comprehension monitoring are really executive functioning skills but those are related skills to language understanding vocabulary knowledge it's not just enough to know the dictionary definition of a word you have to look at the various nuances that a word may have in a given context and idiomatic expressions if someone says they're going to show you the door that doesn't mean that they're going to have you examine the hinges in the doorknob it means they're trying to tell you it's time to leave so that's an idiomatic expression and that expresses language that is not captured by the individual words the verbal portion of traditional iq tests tend to correlate pretty strongly with the global scores on language batteries and speech language assessments and either the vocabulary subtest or some portions of the verbal portions of iq test have been used in hundreds of studies in the reading research as an index of language skills with that said the better route to take when it comes to evaluating vocabulary knowledge is to request an evaluation from a speech language pathologist they are going to be much more well suited to evaluate vocabulary although in a pinch we can look at things such as verbal iq scores if in fact those have been gathered you can also assess a student's vocabulary informally just through interacting with them however what we've learned from earlier sessions is this can be problematic and the child may seem to have a good command of everyday language but their broader vocabulary may not be quite as well in place as compared to their peers of same age and for english learners their trajectory in developing vocabulary is going to be a little bit longer compared to their native english speaking peers grammar and syntax of course is essential to comprehend language however grammar and syntax tends not to be a separate problem typically a child that has difficulties with grammar and syntax either due to a language related problem or the fact that they're an english learner it's usually part of a package deal these children also typically have vocabulary concerns it's pretty rare that we have a child who has really good vocabulary but they struggle with grammar and syntax and speech pathologists have some very good batteries that can evaluate for these skills background knowledge is is related to both language and experience as well as just general knowledge and there's two types first of all general background knowledge this very much influences language comprehension and there are some subtests available on norm batteries for example the wechsler scales has an optional information subtest the woodcock johnson has more than one background knowledge type task one study i did the correlation between reading comprehension and the information subtest from the wechsler was a positive 0.6 which is pretty pretty substantial and then there's specific topical knowledge this is not quite as easy to assess because we don't have available subtests for that but it's still very important one of the most famous studies along these lines is they took children with low language skills who knew a lot about baseball and they took children who had very high language skills who didn't know much of anything about baseball and they had them read a passage on baseball and sure enough the kids that had more background knowledge and less overall language skills did better on answering the comprehension questions so that shows you the importance of having adequate background knowledge and my one comment is that i think that we might neglect trying to access background knowledge as a contributing factor and the information subtest off the wechsler as well as one or more of those general information subtests off the woodcock johnson might be a good route to take as mentioned in a previous session we build a mental model or it's also called a situation model that becomes our our framework for interpreting what's going on and that only happens by piecing together uh vocabulary piecing together background knowledge and using obviously our grammar and our syntax in order to understand what's going on in a situation and it requires inferencing which we'll talk about momentarily one of the difficulties is there really is not a direct test that i know of about how to create a mental model the mental model is central to language comprehension and it's central therefore to reading comprehension the idea is that we need to look at the components that go into creating a mental model in order to understand one's ability to make up such a model and understand what they're reading working memory seems to correlate with just about all type of learning it refers to the temporary store of information that has to do with what we're thinking right now so if someone gives us a a sentence and if they give us a longer sentence a longer sentence there comes a point where there's too much in the sentence for us to keep track of and in fact sentence memory is one of the ways that we test working memory speech pathology batteries have sentence memory the classic iq test and even other tests such as the comprehensive test of phonological processing will have some sort of digit span task where kids repeat back numbers and the series of numbers gets longer and longer attention like working memory seems to influence all type of learnings on some level or another and it can also affect listening comprehension differently than reading comprehension this was brought up in a previous session we can distinguish between listening comprehension and language comprehension there are children who do poorly on listening comprehension tests and actually do well on the other aspects of language comprehension such as vocabulary etc and very often it's because these children have lapses of attention so they may have the language capability but they're not applying it in a context of a listening comprehension task and of course in the context of listening in a classroom in terms of evaluating for attention we have many different rating skills available for that as well as observation by a professional who understands attentional difficulties inferencing is central to language comprehension because there's no way every bit of information that is trying to be conveyed is conveyed verbally we have to infer things and without inferencing one would really miss out on a large portion of what a person is trying to communicate verbally or through print and as mentioned earlier it's necessary for building a mental model in a previous session you read a very brief little passage about a girl who wanted to buy a present for a birthday party and within that simple little two or three sentence story there were multiple inferences that had to occur and proper inferencing requires vocabulary and background knowledge now a lot of this may seem to be getting repetitive but what you're seeing is some of these key skills whether it's vocabulary knowledge and background knowledge working memory they all overlap with each other and they all interact with each other in multiple ways but we can conceptually pull them apart for the purpose of assessment to see how much each of these components are contributing to the language comprehension which in turn is contributing to the reading comprehension problems there are some subtests on speech language batteries that we're going to look at inferencing and that might be something to consider when you have a child who has a language comprehension or a reading comprehension difficulty comprehension monitoring is more of an executive functioning skill not so much a language skill per se but it's kind of a meta language skill in the sense of knowing that you're understanding something properly that's true for oral language it's true for written language there really isn't a whole lot in terms of formalized assessment of this particular language related skill but there are some informal ways one is just to stop and ask questions so if you're reading a story to a child or a child is reading a story out loud that you're listening to you can stop and ask the question and see how well they're understanding what they're reading another thing is to when telling a story or reading a story to deliberately throw in something that's nonsensical and see if they're able to catch it and see if they notice that if they're monitoring their own comprehension english learners often function like hyperlexics they pick up on reading the words more quickly than they pick up on the larger vocabulary that they're going to need to fully comprehend the english language and so word level reading grows faster than reading comprehension and their difficulties with language-related skills that encompass almost all the things in our original list at the beginning of this session are going to be related to their status as an english learner keep in mind that some children who are english learners also have some inherent language related problems just like children whose only language is english and it's very difficult to try to tease out how much has to do with english being a new language and how much of it has to do with an inherent language difficulty sometimes we have to use informal approaches i know that i've had to work closely with speech pathologists over the years to try to answer this question and it's never easy but one of the types of questions you want to ask is of the parents and see if you can get a sense from the parents if the child seems to have a good understanding in their native language or not it's not a perfectly reliable approach but at least it can provide some hints so sometimes working with a specialist who works with english learners may also have to involve a speech pathologist as well all those above elements are potential contributors to language difficulties and many if not most of those can be directly assessed such assessment should go alongside reading comprehension tests and students that struggle with reading comprehension because as we saw in the previous session reading comprehension tests can be quite problematic due to the many different types of formats and the less than impressive intercorrelation among those different types of formats language comprehension difficulties can affect reading comprehension language comprehension influenced by let's try that again language comprehension is influenced by a number of very specific skills like vocabulary background knowledge and working memory and assessments of these language related skills can help identify the reason or reasons why a child is struggling in reading comprehension because their difficulty in reading comprehension may very well be based on language related issues assuming that they have good word reading if they don't have good word reading they may have the combined type of reading problem where they have language comprehension problems and word level reading problems and finally knowing a child's language skill profile can help with targeting intervention is the child going to work with a speech pathologist will the speech pathologist work with a teacher or a parent and get a better understanding on how to help support this child's language development do you incorporate language related assessments into reading evaluations if not how best might you do that in the future up next is module 10 and we will be looking at the evidence for the prevention of reading difficulties you