What’s the matter, Anna? Why are you crying?”

“I am reading The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas … it’s so sad!”

“Ah, yes, I know. But, you read that in Year 6, didn’t you? You know what happens in the end.”

“Yes, well, I know I read it, but I have just realised what happens at the end … I didn’t understand that before.”

One of the challenges around developing reading comprehension skills is that it can be really hard to know how well children are understanding what they are reading.

Many years ago, Professor Jane Oakhill and colleagues identified that up to 10 per cent of a class could be poor comprehenders - they might read with fluency and yet fail to make the inferences necessary to gain a complete and meaningful understanding of the text.

Children with poorer comprehension skills, who are just getting by, often have their challenges masked in the classroom. But we think we can spot them through assessment.

We rely on our assessments to select appropriate texts with an effective level of challenge. As teachers, we can assess a pupil’s level of understanding through conversation, asking questions to explore how they are making sense of the text. A structured conversation can reveal a wealth of information about how a child comprehends, but working individually with them can be time-consuming.

Keeping score

So, instead, we track gains in reading comprehension, in a written way, using tests that we’ve compiled ourselves or bought in. There are a wide variety of tests available to use in the classroom. Generally, they are easy to administer and result in a score, which may be described as a reading age. This has a seductive simplicity - allowing us to easily monitor progress, tracking it on a graph.

As Nation and Snowling (1997) suggest: “Standardised reading tests are an important tool in that they provide clear and objective estimates of a child’s ability compared with other children of the same age.”

But reading is not a simple thing and therefore the testing of reading becomes a complex thing. Studies show that different tests of reading measure different aspects of this complex process (Nation and Snowling, 1997; Colenbrander et al, 2017).

Typically, for younger children, they measure the ability to pronounce individual written words, or retrieve literal interpretations from simple sentences. Tests for older children can focus more on the number of words read, the complexity of individual words, the grammar used or the challenge of vocabulary - in short, different aspects of reading, rather than the depth of understanding a child may have.

As the example I began with highlights, it’s important to ask: what does reading with meaning actually mean? At an earlier age, Anna read the book The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas with her teacher. She followed the plot, could describe the characters and relate the narrative. But she had failed to understand the story as the author intended.

When she had the opportunity to reread the text a few years later, her lack of understanding as a younger child became evident (and maybe that was a good thing).

A text is more than the word count, range of vocabulary or length of sentences. We need to ensure we are assessing the cognitive, social, cultural and contextual understanding children gain from their reading - not just the facts.

Megan Dixon is director of literacy at the Aspire Educational Trust

This article originally appeared in the 10 May 2019 issue under the headline “Comprehension: don’t take it as read”