Putting the answer before the question: A new way of understanding reading comprehension.

Most teachers assess reading comprehension by asking questions. These questions may be very broad, such as 'What was the story about?' or else very detailed, listed on a worksheet perhaps. Yet why do we ask the kinds of questions we do? How much story understanding do they really get at? Why is it that 'some children are able to answer our questions even though we know they are not good readers? In the last five years, we have come a lot closer to understanding the nature of questions (and of children's answers), and as a result, we are now better able to identify what children have to do in order to answer comprehension questions - and how they do it.