Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Twice Exceptional reading comprehension issues, please help!

I haven't seen this mentioned here, and it may only apply in higher grades, but DD sometimes gets reading comp questions wrong because she overthinks (classic gifted kid stuff). I keep reminding her that she needs to look at it from the angle of "What do they WANT me to put?", and "What is the simplest right answer?", etc, not "What other answer might possibly be correct if I looked at it from all angles, microanalyzed the meaning of the word 'is', and used my knowledge of speciation?"

Thanks to everyone. I never thought that reading aloud or silently made a difference. I will ask him to read silently next time, then retell as he usually reads his books that way. However, he only prefers factual books like Ancient Egypt and snakes, etc. Fiction or stories are just so hard for him. He retells facts and stories associated to the facts. His teacher says he is definitely better when the story is read to him.

I have no idea what level they have him reading and are testing at but *I* failed multiple comprehension quizzes at the back of my kid's lower level readers. I would read along with my DD, be too bored to retain anything and then get to questions at the end that half the time weren't even about the text but were about extra details from the pictures!! ("What colour is mama bear's scarf?").

Is it possible to test his comprehension at the level he reads at home just to see what happens? They don't test 5th grader's reading comprehension skills on kindy books, but kindy kids reading at a 5th grade level have to be able to prove they still have "comprehension" skills that they either never needed or have long since forgotten.

Our son also taught himself to read at 2, though he is not really an avid reader, certainly not of fiction. He does well on most parts of a reading test but not on the DIBELS "retell" portion. I could probably train him to pay attention to the boring stories, but it hasn't seemed worth the bother yet. In any case the OP's situation is evidently common in the gifted population.

but achild with no LDs might have a difficult time with an instruction to "summarize" if they are a child who remembers things in a very detailed way.


This.

My DD had a really awful time with "summarize" because even if you tried to gently explain that she needs to "leave out all but the most important details" then she'd claim, well-- but if it wasn't IMPORTANT, then it wouldn't have been part of the story.

LOL.

She still gets multiple layers of meaning out of more advanced literature, which is problematic since this is a higher order literacy skill than recall or simple analysis...

and wowie, do the lower level Bloom's questions lay her out sometimes. Multiple choice is the. worst. that way for kids like her.


"Choose the answer which best represents the passage's meaning:"

(Augh)

Because they can LEGITIMATELY argue that two, none, or all of the answers are equally correct; and be right about the logic. It's just that the level of questions is so far below my DD's reading level that they miss the mark completely.

We've also run into problems that I'd say are far more directly related to asynchrony there. My DD, by virtue of being a VERY young reader relative to her peers, has a different set of life experiences than her more typically developing peers. This can show up in some surprising ways when she assigns a completely idiosyncratic connotative meaning to something that was supposed to mean something specific to everyone. Well, not to her.

It's really opened my eyes to just HOW flawed multiple choice assessment actually is, and why it's profoundly toxic to use it to assess learning or achievement. I never realized how much they hurt outliers until I watched it in action.

Yup--this is my DD, too. Yes, well, that's TRUE...I really see your point...and YET...what did they WANT you to pick? (I refrain from adding, "Think like a not-very-smart person...")

BTW, at least once this year, DH, DD, and I ALL picked the wrong answer on a reading comp question. Third grade, people. Lots of brainpower in the room. We puzzled over it together. All of us were quite mystified. I still don't know what the right answer was! (They all seemed wrong.)

We worked VERY hard last year with DS9 on "retelling" and event order, and summarization. These are all things that show up on the state end of year tests, so it was important that he understand how to give the expected answer. He would have rather basically re-told the entire story to you, but he's learned, thankfully, how to identify the types of events that most people consider important in retelling a story. (Granted, he personally still prefers to emphasize other parts of the story, or retell the entire thing.)

All this retelling stuff is interesting to me because I don't feel like we've ever encountered it. At least, I've never heard anything about it from DD or a teacher. I don't know if this is variable by state. DD doesn't seem to be evaluated for reading level like other kids here are (in fact, I don't think I've ever been given a reading level for her, not that I care). She does have to summarize a lot on assignments, which is not an issue for her, so maybe it's a strength and that's why it doesn't come up.