How to Look for Evidence of Growth in Comprehension

Why are 'the arts' such a good place to help develop reading comprehension skills?
Many strategies initiated by an arts integrated program help to promote reading comprehension.

Lets take a look at what kind of evidence to look for from children's responses that would indicate that this deeper level of learning is indeed occurring.

Strategies

Develop sensory images:
*make pictures in mind
*use multiple senses
*include an emotional component
*adds detail through imagery
*develops a mental model to organize meaning

Building and Activating Schema
*Makes text-to-self connections
*Makes text-to-text connections
*Makes text-to-world connections
*Uses connections to build meaning

Questioning
*Asks yes or no questions
*Asks higher level questions
*Asks questions to clarify author's intent
*Uses questioning to evolve in his or her thinking

Determining Importance
*Distinguishes between details and essential ideas
*Recognizes important themes

Inferring
*Communicates emotional content of text
*Has insight into the characters and events of story
*Makes predictions passed on inferences of text
*Creates a personal interpretation
*Discovers author's  implied messages

Synthesis
*Creates a summary of the text
*Discovers commonalities in texts
*Generates new meaning based on author's ideas and own personal interpretations

Mantione, R. Weaving through words: using the arts to teacher reading comprehension strategies.
     2003. International Reading Association. Newark, De.