Informational Comprehension Assessment in the Primary Grades:
Concepts of Comprehension Assessment (COCA)™

Nell K. Duke, Principal Investigator

We are pleased to announce the completion of an assessment of informational reading comprehension designed for first and second grade students: the Concepts of Comprehension Assessment (COCA)™. This assessment is designed to measure four contributors to reading comprehension: comprehension strategy use, vocabulary strategy use and knowledge, knowledge of informational text features, and comprehension of graphics in the context of text. It is designed for use by classroom teachers, reading specialists, and paraprofessionals to inform instruction, and by researchers to evaluate interventions or examine reading comprehension development.

There are two forms of the assessment (Dragonflies and Salmon), each of which takes approximately 15 minutes to administer. The assessment is administered individually. While it may not be possible or even advisable to administer the assessment to every child in a class, it may be very helpful to administer it to those students about whom you have special concerns or to a random sample of students (to obtain a sense of the class's reading comprehension strengths and needs). We are grateful for generous support provided to this project by the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the Literacy Achievement Research Center (LARC). We are making this assessment and all associated materials available free for download by following the links below.

We are in the process of completing a technical report about the validity and reliability of this assessment. We are also conducting final analyses of the relationship between scores on one form of the assessment and scores on the other (i.e., Dragonflies versus Salmon). We will make this report available on this website as soon as it is available.

Downloading the COCA™ Materials

You are welcome to download the COCA™ materials free of charge. However, we would like to keep a record of the people who download the COCA™ so that we can send you information about updates or revisions and elicit your feedback on the materials. Your contact information will not be used for any purposes unrelated to communicating about the COCA™.

These assessments were made possible in part by a grant from Carnegie Corporation of New York.
The statements made and views expressed are solely the responsibility of the author.