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.
