Cloze Procedure

The cloze procedure is an informal tool for assessing students’ comprehension. Teachers use the
cloze procedure to gather information about readers’ abilities to deal with the content and
structure of texts they are reading. Teachers construct a cloze passage by taking an excerpt from
a book-a story, an informational book, or a content-area textbook-that students have read and
deleting roughly every fifth word in the passage. The deleted words are replaced with blanks.
Then students read the passage and add the missing words. Students use their knowledge of
syntax (the order of words in English) and semantic (the meaning of words within the sentences)
to successfully predict the missing words in the text passage. Only the exact word is considered
the correct answer. The following activity was devised by a fourth-grade teacher to assess
students’ understanding during a unit on astronomy. The three paragraphs were taken from a
class book, and each was written by a different student.

CUBING

Cubing is an instructional strategy that asks students to consider a concept from a variety of
different perspectives.

K-W-L CHART

K-W-L charts are graphic organizers that help students organize information before, during and
after a unit or a lesson. They can be used to engage students in a new topic, activate prior
knowledge, share unit objectives, and monitor learning.

GRAND CONVERSION

A Grand Conversation is a student-led conversation that takes place after the entire class has read
a section of a book, an entire book, a poem, or other reading material. For young children, the
teacher can read the book aloud. Students lead discussions with their peers as they share
thoughtful responses on the book while the teacher acts as facilitator. As facilitator, the teacher
ensures that each student speaks at least once by responding to a peer’s comment, making a
comment or asking a question. Students learn that constructing meaning from books comes from
what they bring to the story, their background experiences, as well as from the knowledge and
experiences shared by their peers.