Normas de Desempenho em Compreensão de Leitura Textual para Crianças de 1º Ano a 6ª Série

Abstract

This study presents the performance standards for an assessment tool, constituted by two different tasks, elaborated to evaluate reading comprehension of narrative texts. Retelling and a questionnaire based on the story “The Thing” permitted the evaluation of children from the 1st to 3rd grades, whereas the same tasks based on the story “The Rabbit and the Dog” assessed children from the 4th to 6th grade. The study included 176 children (51.7% girls) between seven and 12 years old, from the first to sixth grade of elementary school, from public and private schools in Porto Alegre-RS. Normative scores for children from the 1st to 6th grades were divided by years of education and type of school. Descriptive statistics (mean and standard deviation) and comparison of the scores on the reading comprehension tasks were carried out using years of education and type of school (public and private) of children (Mann-Whitney and Kruskal-Wallis). Compared to younger children from initial grades, older children from advanced grades showed a better performance in reading comprehension. Students from private schools performed better when compared to students from public schools. The assessment tool seems to be useful to distinguish performances of children from different years of education and type of schools and it is easily applied. Clinicians, researchers and professionals in the school environment can use the instrument.