I had a similar situation with my first grader last year. The teacher gave him the second grade reading book and once he finished reading it he was started on the third grade reading book. She gave him a second grade reading comprehension test which showed his fluency was at 90%+, but then comprehension was scored at less than 40%. I probed a bit to find out what was going on and it turns out that he bombed the first question which was "What was the author's intention?" My son asked what "intention" meant and the tester marked it as not understanding the book! When there are only a few questions, just getting one question wrong really dropped his score. I would be surprised if an average second grader knows what "intention" means. IMHO the question was poorly formed. It is just frustrating that he got the third grade reading book taken away because of it. I don't think a kid would spend the time to read multiple 200+ page books every single week if they didn't understand them!
