Acadience Reading Pre-K: PELI: Comprehension

What is PELI Comprehension?

There are two parts to the Comprehension subtest of the PELI. Part I, Comprehension Questions, and Part II, Shared Retell.

Part I, Comprehension Questions, assesses a child’s ability to make predictions and inferences and to answer questions related to a simple story. The use of questions to assess comprehension has a long history in education and provides a way of directly assessing a child’s understanding of story elements that are explicitly stated as well as those that are not explicitly stated and require a child to make inferences based on the information provided. Comprehension questions have been found to provide a reliable and valid measure of preschool children’s story comprehension (Dempsey & Skarakis-Doyle, 2001; Paris & Paris, 2003). In addition, children’s answering of comprehension questions has been found to be sensitive to the effects of narrative interventions with preschool children (Spencer, Kajian, Petersen, & Bilyk, 2013).

Part II, Shared Retell, assesses a child’s ability to fill in the missing words in the story in an oral cloze task. Cloze tasks, used to assess reading comprehension, consist of text from which words have been deleted in a systematic manner. The child is asked to “fill in the blank” and provide the word or words that have been deleted from the text. Shared Retell consists of the assessor retelling the PELI story with missing words. During the retell, the assessor shows a series of pictures from the book and retells the story, pausing for the child to fill in the word or words that have been deleted. Oral cloze tasks like Shared Retell reduce the memory and expressive language demands of traditional comprehension question and/or story retell tasks (Skarakis-Doyle & Dempsey, 2008) and have demonstrated reliability and validity in assessing story comprehension of preschool-aged children (e.g., Joint Story Retell, Dempsey & Skarakis-Doyle, 2001).

Overview

 Scoring Rules and Tips

Part I. Comprehension Questions

All of the comprehension questions are scored on a 3-point scale, with a score of 2 being correct, a score of 1 being partially correct, and a score of 0 being incorrect.

• Circle the 2 if the child’s answer is accurate and demonstrates that the child clearly comprehends the story context and storyline.
• Circle the 1 if the response is partially correct. For example, the child may name another item from the story rather than the target item. On a question requiring an inference, the child may state a plausible action within the context of the story that is not based on all of the relevant information.
• Circle the 0 if the child’s response is clearly incorrect within the context of the story. In addition, the following responses are scored as 0:
  • Responses such as “I don’t know,” or “nothing”
  • No response
  • Vague responses

A rubric with guidelines for scoring each of the types of comprehension questions on the PELI is provided in the Acadience Reading Pre-K: PELI Assessment Manual.

Part II. Shared Retell

All of the Shared Retell items are scored as 1 or 0, with a score of 1 being correct and a score of 0 being incorrect.

• Circle 1 if:
  • the child’s answer is the exact word or phrase included in the book, or
  • the child’s answer is a synonym or phrase that correctly conveys the meaning, or
  • the child’s answer fits the sentence and is plausible given the setting and storyline.
•   Circle 0 if:
  •  the child’s answer is clearly incorrect.

For more information, please reference the Acadience Reading Pre-K: PELI Assessment Manual which is available to users who have purchased the assessment.