Assessing Comprehension in the Classroom: Comparing Performance on Sentence Verifcation and Classroom Read-aloud Tasks

Listening and reading comprehension are complex processes that are difficult to assess. Many standardized comprehension tests place high demands on memory, assess only sentence length material, and may not reflect how students comprehend classroom material. The present study employed a sentence verification task ( S m ) to test 60 grade 7 and 8 students' comprehension of expository passages. Participants read or listened to expository passages and then verified whether test sentences were present in the original passages. The validity of the SVT as a measure of comprehension was examined by wmparing performance on the SVT with two standardized comprehension measures and a classroom read-aloud task that was developed. The SVT was strongly correlated with the read-aloud cornprehension task. Students cornprehended approximately 70% of the expository material presented in these two tasks. The SVT was also moderately correlated with the standardized listening and reading comprehension rneasures. These findings irnpiy that the SVT is a valid measure of comprehension and may be used to examine students' comprehension of classroom material.