Science of Reading: The Podcast S10 E5: Reimagining comprehension assessment, with Gina Biancarosa, Ed.D.
Nov 19, 2025
Gina Biancarosa, Ed.D., a professor at the University of Oregon and expert in reading comprehension assessment, shares her insights on effective comprehension evaluation. She discusses the limitations of traditional methods and introduces MOCA, a new approach focusing on in-the-moment understanding rather than just outcomes. Gina highlights the importance of think-aloud protocols to uncover student strategies and differentiates between paraphrasers and elaborators. She also emphasizes teaching students to connect everyday inferencing to their reading to enhance comprehension.
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Questions Can Alter Comprehension Evidence
- Asking questions after reading changes what readers think and can create thoughts they didn't form naturally.
- Post-reading questions therefore may not reveal the authentic in-the-moment comprehension process.
Think-Alouds Reveal Reading Strategies
- Think-alouds ask readers to verbalize thoughts after each sentence, revealing strategies like paraphrasing or inference-making.
- Researchers code those verbalizations to identify comprehension processes.
Two Struggling Reader Profiles
- Poor comprehenders cluster into paraphrasers or uncontrolled elaborators during think-alouds.
- These patterns guided MOCA's design to detect process differences without prompting.
