Fountas and Pinnell
Benchmark Assessment System

1. Read title

2. Read the standardized introduction

Move away from simple answer, so students stop thinking that purpose is to answer teachers questions correctly

Puropose is to gain behavioural evidence of a student's understanding.

Be sure student understands that it is expected that they are going to have a conversation

First conversation prompt is usually: "Talk about what you have learned in this book," or, "Talka bout what happened in the story."

Acceptable prompts: "Say more about that," "Tell more," "What else?" " Why?"

Your goal is to have the student hit on all 3 factes of comprehenshion: within the text, beyond the text, and about the text.

The better you know the book the easier it is to have a conversation with the student.

Good conversations have a back and forth quality, with some questions, but not a steady barage.

Scoring the Comprehension Conversation

You need to use established guidlelines when scoring accuracy

Total the errors and self-corrections in each line of text separately

Count the errors by going down the column

Figure out the accuracy score

Use the accuracy rate bar

If score is below 95% you may want to stop the assessment and not begin the comprehension conversation

The number of self-corrections tells the teacher the extent to which a student is monitoring and noticing the errors they make.