What Is the Difference in the Reading Assessment Between Comprehension & Interpretation?
- As a process of memory retention and close reading skills, the primary place readers seek evidence for comprehension information is in the primary text of the piece under assessment. Readers may reread previous sections of a book, look for important pieces of information from a story or identify specific situations the characters faced in the story. Comprehension assessment becomes the first reading assessment, providing information and specific events interpretive readers can use to justify further analysis. A comparative analysis seeks to answer the question, “What happened in the story?”
- Once a reader obtains enough comprehensive evidence to support a point about a primary source, an interpretive reader compares these points to other sources, such as other pieces of literature, poems or the historical experiences of the author. Interpretation encourages a comparative study of one piece of literature against other pieces of literature, or against popular ideas at the time the work was written. An interpretive analysis seeks to answer the question, “Why did the author present the story, using the events and situations from the story, and how do they relate to other popular ideas?”
- Comprehension testing is factual, asking students to remember specific details from a story, the sequence of events or the central characters. Comprehension questions ask the questions of “who,” “what,” “when” and “how.” For instance, a comprehension test on a selected work may ask, “Who was driving the car in chapter 3?” “What was Tom’s interest in Jill?” “When did Tom first talk to Jill” or “How did Tom approach the conversation with Jill?” Each comprehension question must have a single correct answer, as each question relates to a single factual experience from the story.
- Interpretive testing is subjective. Interpretive questions ask the questions of “why.” As an example, an interpretive test may ask, “Why did Jill turn Tom down initially?” The question asks the reader to consider the context of the relationship between the characters both in relation to the events of the story, but also in comparison to other works from the same period. Readers may point to similar interactions between characters of other stories, or identify a character’s actions and decision-making by a specific moral ideal. Each comprehension question may have multiple right answers, but require readers to build a strong case for each logical interpretation by identifying several similar elements of each story.
