ABSTRACT
Purpose:
to characterize reading comprehension performance of students from the 3rd to 5th grades of elementary school.
Methods:
378 students participated in this research, divided in 3 groups: GI (102 students of the 3rd grade), GII (121 students of the 4th grade), GIII (155 students of the 5th grade). All the students were evaluated using the protocol of assessment in reading comprehension, which is composed of four texts: two expositive and two narrative. Each one of the texts has eight questions, four of which are literals and four inferential, two related to the microstructure and two related to the macrostructure of the text.
Results:
the statistics analyses showed that the students presented fewer mistakes according to their academic progress, indicating that the experience in reading during the years at school contributed to improve comprehension. In addition, some students presented better performance in their answers after reading the texts for the second time.
Conclusion:
the study demonstrated that the students had superior averages to inferential questions and to macrostructure questions. They also presented superior averages to literals questions of expositive texts and to inferential questions of narrative texts, which indicated that each type of text presented a particular difficulty to the students. Therefore, it was possible to demonstrate through the application of this protocol, the performance of the students in reading comprehension and their difficulties in this ability.
Keywords:
Evaluation; Comprehension; Educational Measurement; Education; Reading
