Abstract
The main aim of the project GACR Reading comprehension - Typical Development and Its Risks is to contribute to the knowledge about the forms of comprehension and reading comprehension development during first grades of elementary school. In the present chapter, we focus on the description of the measures used for reading comprehension assessment.
Besides tests already widely available in our country, we introduce newly constructed tests, in which we responded to the strongest theoretical challenges from literature abroad. The new tests were constructed based on the theoretical background, piloted, edited and used in research of students from 1 st to 4 th grade of elementary schools.
First, we present results of descriptive statistics of the different reading comprehension tests - in a sentence comprehension task, and story comprehension tasks in formats of oral and silent reading. In further analysis, we investigate the relationships to tests selected as comprehension measures - we examine the relationship between cognitive abilities, language skills (including phonological, morpho-syntactic and semantic skills), and reading decoding skills.
For the decoding abilities assessment we used tools mapping phonological and visual and semantic aspects of reading. Attention was paid also to listening comprehension, as the ability significantly influencing reading comprehension performance.
