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PROS of assessing comprehension with WORDLESS picture books... 

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PROS of assessing comprehension with WORDLESS picture books... 

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- authentic experience of reading a book with lower stress for striving readers
- interactive, social form of assessment that allows teachers to dig for deeper understandings of the inner workings of student's comprehension and deductions
- allows for creative, critical, complex comprehension without any literal answers given in text
- ALL INFERENCES... because nothing is explicitly stated
- eliminates potential stress and barriers that reading text carries for kids who struggle with decoding to build positive experiences and dialogues around text
- provides teachers with greater insight into students' cognitive processes and how they apply background knowledge/personal lived experiences

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WORDLESS PICTURES BOOKS = Top-Down comprehension 

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WORDLESS PICTURES BOOKS = Top-Down comprehension 

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NO bottom-up decoding/interactions with texts
- leads to higher levels of complexity in comprehension and greater critical/creative thinking

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Combines the elements of "top down" and "bottom up" comprehension, considering that when reading a text, these processes occur simultaneously while students are reading.
***We do NOT have to get the "bottom up" (decoding, knowledge of individual sounds, letters, and words) skills in place before we can support students in "top down" (reader background knolwedge of people, places, events, activites and CONCEPTUAL KNOWLEDGE) interpretations of text.

- Conceptual Knowledge
- Schema a out genres - previous experiences with similar kinds of stories/texts
- in NARRATIVES, we expect narrative scripts, certain grammar and schemas with
setting, characters, problems, solutions, and theme
- Connections: (text-text, text-self, text-world)
- experiences with similar illustrations, characters, problems, solutions, themes...
- semantic, conceptual, and narrative relations

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COMPREHENSION is a COMBINATION of bottom-up and top-down processes... 

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COMPREHENSION is a COMBINATION of bottom-up and top-down processes... 

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The TRANSACTIONAL MODEL or INTERACTIVE MODEL of reading

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"Reading is a psycholinguistic guessing game." 

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"Reading is a psycholinguistic guessing game." 

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(Goodman, 1967)

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Theory of comprehension that asserts that MEANING MAKING is driven by the READER and what they bring to the text (personal experiences, prior and experiential knowledge; schema, assumptions about text, genre & author, intentions/purposes for reading)
- emphasis on higher levels of comprehension (more critical and creative comprehension)
- readers "MAP OUR EXPERIENCES" onto text... meaning and schemas about narratives and stories and experiences are made in our heads and APPLIED to various texts
- our schemas influence how we interpret texts/comprehend

aka.... "Whole to Part" model of comprehension... looks beyond the text for comprehension skills and abilities, expecting students to go beyond the text in making meaning
- CRITICAL LITERACY APPROACH....or "OUTSIDE-in skills"

- we bring our perceptions, opinions, and biases to our reading to make meaning

***Transactional/Interactional Model of comprehension = reciprocal interactions between info in text (phonological processing, syntax, and semantics) and our BRAINS (lived experiences, schema, conceptual knowledge) *** SYMBIOTIC relationship

***Reading is a SOCIAL interaction?***
**Whole Language Movement... **

Consider Kenneth Goodman's perspective... his example of TOP DOWN comprehension = "The monkey ate a ______" - we make meaning out of our experiences and project on text what we already know

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Theory of comprehension that asserts that comprehension happens by children starting with the smallest units of letters --> meaning.
- Meaning is assumed to be driven by alphabetic text alone
- Decoding has to happen first for comprehension to happen
Cognitive Hierarchy that leads to comprehension...
- graphemes (letters)
- phonemes (sounds)
- syllables
- morphemes
- word
-sentence
-paragraph
- MEANING...

aka... "Part to Whole" model... that the sum of the parts of reading (WR/decoding and fluency --> comprehension)... VERY traditional approach in which it is the reading of TEXT that elicits COMPREHENSION

***reading just happens in your head***

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CONSIDER THE STUDENT & ASSESSMENT METHOD MATCH

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CONSIDER THE STUDENT & ASSESSMENT METHOD MATCH

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Think Alouds are another great tool in our teaching and learning toolboxes, but we must always consider our students and what mode of expression will get their most in-depth answers when assessing.

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Visual cues are key for inviting/reminding students to stop and share their thoughts while reading (Serafini, 2010)... before I used this for assessment in my classroom, I would provide modeling, partner practice, independent practice and scaffolding to support students in thinking aloud while reading so that come assessment, they are comfortable with sharing their thoughts while reading.

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By asking students to "think aloud" about what is going on in their minds when reading, being read to, or looking at wordless picture books, educators can gain a greater understanding of what students are attending to, how they are making sense of the text (or not), and any strategies used (Serafini, 2010). In order for this to be accurate, students would first have to have plenty of practice in "Thinking Aloud" with plenty of teacher and peer modeling so that they are comfortable with sharing the depth and breadth of their thoughts. If students struggle to verbally articulate their thoughts, this "THINKING ALOUD" would not be an accurate representation of their thoughts - especially if they could write their answers more completely than orating them.

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integration of information ACROSS pics is key to greater narrative comprehension abilities (PARIS & PARIS, 2003) 

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integration of information ACROSS pics is key to greater narrative comprehension abilities (PARIS & PARIS, 2003) 

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1. Picture Walk (observing kid's spontaneous and independent interactions with picture book while "reading"
2. Retelling
3. Prompted Comprehension -->
(a) spontaneous reactions

to the story, (b) retelling of the story, (c) comprehension

of explicit story information, (d) comprehension of implicit story information, and

(e) total storybook comprehension (Paris & Paris, 2003, p. 43-44).

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Correlation between ability to construct stories from picture books at 5-6 years and reading skills 2 years later... (Paris & Paris, 2003, p. 42) 

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Correlation between ability to construct stories from picture books at 5-6 years and reading skills 2 years later... (Paris & Paris, 2003, p. 42) 

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Decoding precedes comprehension? or comprehension supports decoding? ... RECIPROCAL nature of comprehension and decoding and assessing comprehension must be possible apart from decoding process (to assess the cognitive and verbal functioning key to students' early development (Paris & Paris, 2003, p. 41)

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Narrative competence is among the fundamental cognitive skills that influence early reading development." (Paris & Paris, 2003, p. 40) 

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Narrative competence is among the fundamental cognitive skills that influence early reading development." (Paris & Paris, 2003, p. 40) 

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Story-telling/narrating "is an authentic experience in young children’s lives,

and it reveals important cognitive accomplishments" (Paris & Paris, 2003, p. 40)

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We are surrounded by narrative stories from the time we are born and narratives shape our earliest language experiences.  Socially, we become story-tellers (part of community and they way in which we view and process the world as we learned in Frye's class...) and narrate our own experiences, the experiences of others, retell favorite stories/movies, and orally create our own.  "Narratives become important for communication

between adults and children because

they are interwoven through so many facets of daily

experience" (Paris & Paris, 2003, p. 37).

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Processes for "Making Meaning" out of Wordless Pic Books

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Processes for "Making Meaning" out of Wordless Pic Books

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Kids construct meaning through... "a) their ongoing

construction of a sensible story schema from the

pictures and (b) their previous experiences with similar

pictures, schemata, and stories." AND (c) using strategies such as inferencing, predicting, summarizing, identifying main ideas, predicting, backtracking, and monitoring comprehension (Paris & Paris, 2003, p. 37).
- ultimately, all processes serve function to "construct relations among events depicted in pictures to create a coherent story" (Paris & Paris, 2003).
- Process used to construct meaning from wordless texts is similar to the cognitive processes used to construct meaning from texts

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Wordless Picture Books and Older Students 

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Wordless Picture Books and Older Students 

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I remember reading WONDERSTRUCK for one of Dr. Ward's classes and remember thinking just how much of the storyline was conveyed by the portions of the book that were told through wordless, detailed pictures. This sort of wordless text might appeal to older, striving readers?

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Wordless picture books allow educators to asses students' sense of story without students having to read text or be read to.  Wordless picture books provide visual as opposed to auditory stimulus to students and I've learned about assessing sense of story and narration from Gill's classes by reading to children and asking them to retell, but not through wordless picture books.   Assessing sense of story through a read-aloud and retelling is heavily based in linguistics - but assessing narrative comprehension with picture books minimizes linguistic cues to meaning-making and reasoning (Paris & Paris, 2003).  CONSIDER LISTENING COMPREHENSION V. READING COMPREHENSION (decoding required) V. PICTURE COMPREHENSION (less linguistic hinderances)... "Wordless picture books with coherent

stories permit assessments of comprehension independent of decoding skills.... Narrative stories can be communicated verbally, in print, or in pictures..." (Paris & Paris, 2003, p. 40).

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for the myriad of difficulties that children encounter as they learn to read..." (Paris & Paris, 2003, p. 36).

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Paris, A. H., & Paris, S. G. (2003). Assessing narrative comprehension in young children. Reading Research Quarterly, 38(1), 36-76.

Serafini, F. (2010). Classroom reading assessments: more efficient ways to view and evaluate your readers. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.