CLOZE strategy

Another new instructional strategy that I am trying this week is called the cloze procedure. Here is a direct link that offers what it is, how to use it, and why it is important. http://olc.spsd.sk.ca/de/pd/instr/strats/cloze/index.html

Over and over and year after year I have been told that progress monitoring the students with a curriculum based measure is not helpful because it only show fluency and not comprehension. For the most part, tracking fluency is sufficient due to an 80% correlation between fluency and comprehension. In order to provide more conclusive data, using a CLOZE procedure would be one researched based option. The cloze procedure is a technique where words are omitted from a passage. The passage is then read with the goal being to insert the proper word to complete the passage and construct meaning from the text.

My 1^st graders were given a maze passage from AIMSweb.  This is similar to a CLOZE passage.  As the students read the grade level passage, each sentence had one correct word pared with two other incorrect words. After reading through the sentence, the kids circled the proper word that completed the sentence.  The goal was for them to construct meaning from the text.  After looking through their completed work, it was clear to me that they each comprehend reading at different levels.  Obviously it is difficult to make meaning from text when they need to decode several words per sentence which in turn hinders fluency.  Limited vocabulary also plays a role in knowing which word makes most sense in the sentence.

I am going to continue having the students complete this learning experience in each grade level.  I may look at adding this strategy to build comprehension next year in my groups.  At his point in the year, during my last week of service, it is hard to tell if I’m going to get “high yield” learning from this strategy.