Concepts of Comprehension Assessment: COCA

The COCA, which is an informal assessment designed to test the literacy of first and second grade students tests four areas they believe is the foundation of literacy:(however they realize more then four areas exist) comprehension stragtegies, vobaulary strategies, and knowledge, knowledge of text and comprehension of graphics. Michigan has deigned this as an nalternative system to a QRI for example, as a means to determine intervention or evaluate comprehnsion.The idea is that the assessmnet would measure if the student is enganing and using the sort of thought processess used by a good, or on level reader. Are they making predictions? Are the activating prior knowledge? Are they making infrences to help them comprehend? Are they summarizing?

Administration
They offer two diffwerent forms of the assessment; Dragonflies and Salmon. They also provide for specific adminstration guidelines. There should be aquiet setting, the text and prompts should be followed EXACTLY, it should be read with good prosody, the page should be pointed to, there should be a clear break betwen reading and questions and the information should be recorded as soon as possible.

Assessment
Michigan provides a worksheet assessment booklet for each of their systems which provides very clear cut text and prompts. For instance in the "Salmon" book page 8, the student reads: When salmon are one year old they hunt small fish called minnows.The teacher must ask: This page tells you the defintion of a word. What is that word? Hopefully, the child usues the skills mentioned like using inference, prior knowledge and predictions. If not the booklet instructs to follow up and re-ask and they provide the specific prompts with which to do so.

Data Interpretation
The system also provides a clear scoring guide for each of the books. The authors provides tools to assign scoring, and tally the scores. It is importnat to remian consistent and document any scoring decsions for student answers that are not listed in their booklets, or reralted to they samples they provide. On the scoring , obne can see that each area is labeled for what dimension or skill is being assessed, this is helpful because the test not only gives a broad view o the childs literacy skills, but a pinpointyed explantion of their struggkles as well.