We're having something of a dilemma with DD7 and her reading comprehension. It's not that she doesn't comprehend what she reads, it's that she doesn't comprehend the comprehension questions. (DS had the same problem, and may still to some degree.)

We discussed this at the P/T conference, and we're trying her in the "at-level" reading group starting this week, instead of the "above-level" one she's been in, though the teacher was reluctant to move her down because she knows DD can read the higher stuff. But the at-level group does more work with comprehension, so we're hoping she can get it to click and then move back up again. I'd rather have her moved down now and get it under control than have it continue for years.

She's been failing reading tests (read the passage, answer the questions) and AR tests, and she answers the most outlandish things. If you just ask her, she can explain what she read, but she can't seem to figure out what the question is asking on the test. Or she can't write what she means in her head. "What is a star?" got the answer, "We see one at day and night." When asked, she says the sun is a star we see in the daytime, and we see the other stars at night, and then she went on and on about stars and planets and space. But even that isn't an answer to "what is a star".

She has 70-some AR points for the year so far, and the teacher sent home a report printed from the AR tests that shows what she passes and fails -- she passes tests from 1st grade to 6th grade level books, and she fails tests from the same range. It doesn't show any particular pattern, e.g. failing high-level tests, etc. The teacher said she had failed all the Diary of a Wimpy Kid tests (grade level 5.x), but actually the report showed that she's passed 5 of them and failed 3, so I pointed that out and sent it back.

My guilt response is that my kids must have this problem because I can't make myself read to them in the currently-prescribed style of reading a few words, asking questions, making predictions, reading a few more words, asking questions, and so on. That drives me absolutely batty, and I didn't do any of it. BUT nobody ever read to me that way, either, and I did just fine.

My kids simply don't comprehend questions like they should. At her age and younger, DS, when asked "how do you ..." would start with "because ..." and I would say, "because is not an answer to how," and explain what kind of answer I was looking for, and talk about question types and all that. It made me crazy because I just couldn't figure out where the wires were crossed. He's grown out of it, for the most part, but she seems to be stuck in it, at least as far as tests go.

Any sage advice? Any resources for teaching kids how to understand what a question is looking for?

Is it possible she is overthinking the questions? I know DS8 sometimes had (and has) this problem, especially when he was in school. Often math or reading comprehension questions were very easy, so he assumed there must be something more to them (trick question? asking for something else?) and would take forever to answer a seemingly obvious question (and would then get it wrong sometimes).

I'll be watching this thread for advice. I am starting to see similar behavior with DD6 in her homework. She just can't believe they would ask her such basic questions, so she starts answering a more complex question, but then doesn't actually answer the original question!

It's related to the mismatch between the child's understanding and the level of the questions. That is my opinion, anyway.

This has been a terrible problem for DD all throughout school (grades 3-12).

While it waxes and wanes, it seems to be tied to low-level cognitive tasks. She just doesn't think on that plane, and hasn't since she was 3 or 4, so asking her concrete questions like "what is a star?" mostly elicits PANIC from her...

because she's thinking "do you mean SCIENTIFICALLY?? At what level? At the level of the reading selection? So what is that.... about fourth grade? Sixth grade?? What do sixth graders know about astronomy, anyway?"

Er-- or does it mean the metaphorical use of the word "star" in this story? Can I give more than one definition??

AUGHHHHH!!!

Never fails.

First, she's a little kid. So I'd keep that idea in mind, especially if your son grew out of it.

I suggest going over a couple passages with her so that you can see precisely what trips her up and then ask her what she's thinking at the time. Can you ask the teacher to give you photocopies of a couple passages that she hasn't done yet, and the questions?

Personally, I question the value of these types of exercises as currently used. They strike me as being of the industrial-learning variety (stuff is created in a uniform way that removes uniqueness and evaluated using broad metrics that don't really work when dealing with the developing mind). However, at the same time, you may be able to find a little area where she's confused about something. Maybe Knitting Mama is right about overthinking. Or maybe she doesn't quite get the point of the exercise. Maybe the question is badly phrased. I can see my own seven-year-old mind getting stuck on "What is a star?" You mean, do I have to classify it? As in, what is a dog? A dog is a mammal? A dog is an animal? A dog is common pet? I don't know how to classify stars! Are there daytime stars and nighttime stars?!?

Actually, when I was doing my oral exam for my M.Sc., I was asked about the kind of reaction that took place in some certain situation with viruses. The answer was "they mutate." But I had a background in chemistry and thought the examiner was looking for the specific type of chemical reaction that took place during the mutation. Boy, did I get flustered.

Maybe it isn't a question of questions, but a question of thoughts?

Hypothesis: Her answer to "What is a star?" is a great answer, presuming that in her mind there were three or four sentences prior to the one that ended up on paper. Or the answer to the question about the answer to the question about the answer... etc. So, her mind is a mini-freight train speeding along and she is standing five feet away and trying to take a picture of it. One time it is only a boxcar, another a coal car and so on.

So "What is a star?"
"It's a glowing dot in the nightsky. OK, really it is an energy factory that's pretty large. But they only seem small because they are far away. However the sun is also a star. So... We see one at day and night."

If this hypothesis is right, then either learning to step back further from the freight train or having a wider aperture might be needed. Thinking the stepping back is developing introspective skills (maturity and like your ...because... method.) And picturing "aperture" more like dysgraphia issues where the need to produce the written output supresses a certain amount of the working memory content.

LOL, some would say there are many options for how to... and therefore may begin with a qualifier (such as "Given that..." or "If... Then..." or even the dreaded "Because..."). Overthinking? Yes. Many gifted individuals see multiple possibilities, which is great in real life problem solving, brainstorming, and for flexibly in working around unforeseen obstacles, wildcards, and roadblocks... but not so great in test-taking. Gifted individuals may gravitate toward thinking about and focusing on the fringe or edge of any concept... the exceptions to the rules, and any possible inconsistencies/discrepancies. The 80/20 seems to apply.

Affirming the validity of their thoughts and statements, and the important role which this type of thinking plays in an inclusive society (for example, making things handicap accessible) may be a first step.

Inviting the individual to consider the mainstream may a second step, and one which guides their thinking toward answers which tests may be looking for and consider "correct" for the majority of situations.

Approaching this from a different angle, kids may answer with their favorite part of a passage, or with what they may already know which was not in the passage (as though they were having a conversation, not as though they were being tested.) Cutting a "window" in a piece of paper and asking the child to find the best words from the passage which answer the question may help the child focus on answering the reading comprehension question at hand. Once the information is found, the child may construct this into the full sentence needed (for example, "What is a star?" A star is...)

Has she been evaluated for speech and language issues? See any other receptive language issues? This seems to be a symptom of something potentially bigger.

Yes, exactly.

I'm inclined to go with geofizz's line of questioning. Couldn't this be a language pragmatics issue? Poor ability to answer questions can be a red flag for that, can't it? (How/because rang a bell for me there.) How is her writing?

My DD has a tendency to overthink stupid reading comp questions, but I always *understand* why she overthought them when she explains why. It's not random and mysterious. It's typical giftie stuff, made a bit worse by her tendency to be overliteral and overprecise at times. She writes great short answers, but multiple choice questions where they're all kind of poor answers will frustrate her into a corner sometimes.

Right--this is exactly DD. "But it says always, and that's not always true, because sometimes...so that can't be the answer." (A bit of ASD-ishness, there, too, perhaps. Who knows.)

Here among the parents of gifted children, it's easy to overlook the basics. They're so far ahead in so many ways, we tend to assume that they've figured out things that they may not have.

I think it would be worthwhile to take some time out and go over the different questioning words: who, what, when, where, why, and how. This is a normal ELA topic for a 7yo. Common Core lists it as a standard for 2nd grade.

Many lovely answers, thank you!

Yes, I could definitely see her sitting there and thinking three or four sentences and then writing down the last one! (Or part of the last one, in many cases.)

I can also see some overthinking -- but I'm on the lookout for that, after DS.

Receptive language issues ... no, she hasn't been evaluated for anything, but if that means what I'm guessing it does, she could have some. She never does anything that she's asked to do (at home) without being told half a dozen times, reminded at every step to stop whatever just distracted her this time and get moving again. Well, "never" is a bit of an exaggeration, but not much. Some things are getting better, but there's still a struggle with many things. Her head is off in the clouds. I assume it's better at school, because she only gets a "color move" once every couple of weeks for the silliness (talked while the teacher was talking, talked in line, touched someone's backpack -- horrors).

She has a lot of trouble with the "what is the main idea of this passage" questions. I suspect it's because she reads it and her mind goes wandering off about every sentence, and by the time she gets to that question, there are lots of other things in her head that weren't actually in the passage, and then (as Zen said) she writes down some little piece of what's going through her brain.

I just don't understand, because I've always been good at tests -- I can pass a test on something I don't even know, just because I know what kind of answers they're looking for, and how to find the important bits. I did a lot of "this is what the question actually says, but this is what they meant, and so even though this would technically be correct, this one is the answer they really want" when I was in school.

ETA: Dude, I have actually seen things mentioning they're working on those words, but it seems like her problems have gotten worse since they started it. Maybe she got confused during that process!

IMO, the quality you describe is what allows very talented people to make new discoveries. Talented people have an ability to notice a subtle way in which something isn't quite right in a way that most other people don't. And yet this particular ability can be vexing for others, because the questioning extends into so many areas. I suspect, but don't actually know, that people with a lot of talent in a given area see problems there where most other people simply don't --- which can make it hard to convince others that there's actually a problem. KWIM?

So again, I'll suggest going over a couple of these passages with her (using passages she's never read before). I would ask her to read a passage and answer the first question. Then I'd talk to her about the answer to try to figure out what she was thinking when she wrote it. Etc., one question at a time.

Yes, like a sensitivity to something that doesn't bother other people. I always have to work hard to convince people there's a gas leak, or the pilot light is out, because they don't smell anything and therefore there's no problem -- or, right now, a battle I've been fighting, that there is something wrong with the water when I'm the only one who can tell.

Ultramarina, her writing is ...variable. She will go in her room or get on the computer and write a long story that makes perfect sense (at least from her POV), but when she has to write five sentences for homework, it can take hours and not make much sense at all. She's in a writing group that meets at the library every other week (just a few kids), and she writes like crazy, but when she read one page to me a while back, about a weird picture she picked out, I couldn't believe how literal she was. She makes up all kinds of stories, is jam-packed with imagination in her play, and yet when it comes to an assignment it just turns off.

Her spelling is quite variable, as well. She normally gets 100% on spelling tests, but misspells things randomly (same word both right and wrong in one paragraph) in her fun writing and even on assignments where she can copy the word on the same page. It boggles my mind.

Val, yes, I'll see if I can get some extras from the teacher that she hasn't seen yet, and maybe I can come up with an idea where her wires are crossed.

My DD may have a similar issue and initially found summarizing difficult but she is getting better at it now.

My DS5 is spectacularly bad at those, to the point that he is now getting 1:1 time with the school SLP to work on "summarizing" skills. I can't say yet whether it is helping.

Exactly!!

The problem is most severe when there seems to be NO "perspective" which is uniform and allows for the selection of one "best" answer. It's like she has to pull back until they are ALL "fuzzy" and potentially correct, and if she pulls in to a view that has discriminating power, then they are ALL incorrect.

Drives us both nuts-- and I've seen a lot of those constructed response questions-- it's not that her approach needs fine-tuning. It's that the questions require a different LEVEL of scrutiny/background for each individual answer selection.


YES.

Assess my DD Socratically, and she'll blow the doors off-- both with her speed and her level of insight. But diminish the activity to a multiple choice series, and you've killed it for her.

This is why (in part) I think that multiple choice questions are (in general) not a good idea at all for gifties. It is way hard to write them well even for a well-defined population. Whole graduate theses have been constructed from less, quite frankly, and ETS can tell you all that they do for on-going item validation, which is a 2-3year process involving LOADS of data inputs.

Pretty sure that AR isn't thinking about it that hard. LOL.


Yes-- only be aware that the people writing assessments now at this level are really not very good at this activity. So then it becomes a matter of dialing in to the individual idiosyncratic thought process of the INDIVIDUAL person who was writing test items.

DD is darned good at this now-- but it's frankly hellish for HG+ people to spend much time at this particular activity. It's completely soul-sucking to have to do this deliberate... um... well, okay, it's a specific kind of "dumbing down" in order to take a particular perspective. I have very mixed feelings about the fact that this is probably the skill that my DD's formal education has done the most to "teach" her.

HK, have you explained to her about (Robert Heinlein's) Friday's reasoning, that where she grew up, the point of an IQ test was to hit a predetermined mark?

I saw a similar comment somewhere else recently, as well -- a guy who made money in college by sitting exams for people, and what a challenge it was to be certain they received a B or C grade as they normally would.

And yes to indigo's "as if they were having a conversation instead of being tested" -- that's how DD answers things.

I was thinking about this just now, and for DD (and, um, ME) I think the multiple-choice problem also has to do with the desire for justice, which we share.

But it CAN'T be that. REALLY. No, okay. FINE. This is so STUPID. You're saying I have to choose this one, when obviously...(steam starts coming out the ears). Arrrgh! I hate this. Why do they have to... (Focus lost, child/parent is ranting)

My DD has been known to make editorial comments in the margin of her worksheets. (---> Doesn't make sense ----> Neither of these is right ---> Seemingly impossible) (The impossible one was possible; just a poorly written math question)

Precisely.

It offends my daughter's sensibilities, for lack of a better turn of phrase.

Indignant-to-outraged is really the only accurate description of her feelings.

ROFL... OMG she's me... An example would be a question DS (then 4ish) asked while we were out walking one day... he said "Mama, which tree is bigger?" I was utterly paralyzed. Taller? Wider? More branches? More rings? More pine needles? More mass? Are you freakin' serious, asking me something like that??? DEFINE BIGGER!!!

I drive most people crazy.

As to the OP's topic... this sort of reminds me of a conversation I had with DS's school SLP. She met with me one day to review his progress and referred to a reading comprehension exercise he had done. She said "Some of his answers are quite odd." You could clearly see a change... from compliance at the beginning to gradual boredom resulting in more and more out of the box answers that were "technically" correct but very divergent from what would be expected. I wish I could remember an example. I feigned concern for the SLP's benefit but secretly I was really proud...

We're having something kind of similar going on with DS (1st grade). For whatever reason he does excellent answering multiple choice questions about books but doesn't do as well with open-ended questions. The teacher says that "making inferences" is an issue. I asked the SLP at the school to do some expressive/receptive language testing to make sure we're not missing something, esp. since he already has an IEP and has been getting services for speech articulation (and he was a late talker so speech has always been an issue). The teacher said she wants to do a few lower level things that he has gaps in in terms of comprehension (or at least expressing comprehension), and then move him along and up levels. She said she asked him "what is the setting of the story?" and he had no idea what she was talking about (no big surprise, though, since the last teacher didn't teach). So things like that. She was also disturbed that he couldn't identify parts of speech like what is a verb, what is a preposition but I'm pretty surprised she thought that was an issue for a first grader. She must have pretty high expectations.

Readworks.org is an interesting site to work on reading comprehension (and free--you just have to sign up for an acct.). I used it sometimes when I was a reading tutor.

what exactly are they expecting from a 7 year old for an answer to what is a star? i am just curious. thanks.

CCN- now when my dd7 asks me questions, she often prefaces it with 'just a short answer, mommy'.

OK> fine.

Out of curiosity, I asked my DD (3.5) to explain what a star is. She was on an astronomy phase forever and still comes back to it once in awhile so I know she knows the correct astronomy definition and she knows that I know that she knows.

Me: "Can you tell me what a star is?"
DD: "Me!"
Me: "Yes, you'll always be one in my eyes but pay attention to the question because you didn't answer it. Can you tell me WHAT a star is, not who."
DD: "Nope" (twirls around and escapes to another room)

This is exactly why I am worried that if we decide to try her out to fancy private schools, she won't be accepted.

Nautigal, if your DD has gotten better over the years, it could be largely developmental but you mentioned that she seems stuck when it comes to taking tests. Maybe an evaluation won't be a bad idea.

A series my SLP friend recommends for young children who need help with answering comprehension questions is Franklin because the problem and its solution are always very clearly defined but your DD is most likely too sophisticated for that. I'll try to think of a more appropriate series for older children.

The psychologist who tested DS6 recently said that it can be worth teaching test taking. She said it can be useful to remind DS, who just read the test then did the answers (all correct) that the answers to the questions at this grade will mostly come from the text, and that the answer to question 1 is usually in the first paragraph, question 2 in the 2nd etc..

You guys are just great!

CCN, I am laughing so hard at that. And chris, "just a short answer" -- that's what DH tells me!

Blackcat, thanks for the site -- I'll check it out. And see if the school can do that "receptive language testing". They did all kinds of things for DS, so I imagine so.

Mana, that conversation is eerily similar to ones in my house -- especially the twirling and escaping. It's DS who has gotten better over the years (though he still has a hard time with setting and stuff), so I'm hoping DD will grow out of it as well.