Hi Julie,
Ohh, writing SMART goals…Not exactly anyone’s favorite task, but an important one regardless. Am I understanding correctly that for students with word reading deficits as well as reading comprehension deficits (meaning their comprehension deficits are not explained by a lack of access to the text due to word reading deficits), your special education team tackles the student’s reading comprehension deficits by turning it into a listening comprehension goal, and you’re wondering if this is the most effective way to target and track progress?
In this case, my first suggestion would be to consult with the students’ speech-language pathologist (SLP), as listening comprehension/receptive language is directly in their purview. The SLP would then hopefully be able to provide more specificity of the area(s) that most strongly impact the students’ comprehension- be it vocabulary, difficulty with complex syntax, inferencing, etc. Essentially, the SLP should have the skills and tools to dissect the top half of the reading rope in order to provide a more thorough analysis of why the student struggles with language comprehension, or at least the greatest contributing factors.
A lot of educators do like comprehension goals akin to your example. My reluctance and bias with goals written in this way is that the treating interventionist (in my experience/opinion) often then just pulls out a passage to read aloud and asks the student to provide the main idea each and every session as a way of marking data on this goal, rather than actually providing the student with the skills and strategies that will ultimately lead to that result. In other words, this may lead to frequent testing rather than teaching. With that in mind, I prefer when goals are written in such a way that requires a student to demonstrate understanding and use of strategies, if applicable and appropriate. Taking your example of main ideas, we want to consider the knowledge, scaffolding, and strategies that will lead to the student progressing in this area. Using Westby et al.’s (2010) evidence-based approach to this (please note that this is a very limited summary of the approach and not intended to replace additional learning!), we can consider that we first want the student to be able to:
- Define and differentiate between the terms necessary for this skill, such as main idea, supporting detail, and summary
- Identify examples of these in a text either by marking/highlighting the passage or using a graphic organizer
- Use a strategy (such as GIST or SWBST) to summarize a passage before providing the main idea
- Generalize these skills across a variety of texts
- And ultimately be able to independently provide a main idea.
Depending on guidance from your district, you may want to shape this into several different goals, one long-term goal with multiple short-term goals, or one goal that embeds these multiple phases. For example, you might want to say:
By September 2025, Student will complete the first 4 phases of Main Idea and Summarization Training (Westby et al., 2010) and then independently use the learned strategies to provide main ideas. Student will score an average of 1.5 using a main idea scoring rubric across 4 consecutive, varied grade-level passages that are read aloud.
Okay, all that said, I’m wondering if part of what you’re asking is also if separating the student’s word reading needs from their comprehension needs is the most effective strategy for targeting and progress monitoring these skill areas, or if they should be intertwined in some way? This idea is complex, and dependent on the child’s specific skills and needs. For example, a student whose vocabulary deficits are impacting their comprehension abilities could absolutely target both of these skill areas simultaneously, even when working on basic sound-letter correspondences. For example, think of how many different meanings could be targeted with the word jam. For students targeting foundational phonics skills but higher-order comprehension struggles (e.g. inferencing), however, this integrated approach may not make the most sense.
Targeting these areas together is a meaningfully different idea than writing a combined goal, however. Keep in mind that you may still want separate goals for word-reading skills and vocabulary/comprehension, even if you intend to primarily target the skills simultaneously. This way, you are able to demonstrate progress in the student’s phonics knowledge development, even if their growth in vocabulary comprehension and use shows more conservative gains, or vice versa. On the other hand, if you are marking a student’s progress in word reading by tracking their oral reading fluency, you may choose to include comprehension as a condition of progress, in order to prevent an inflated view of the student’s fluency at the detriment of reading as fast as possible without attention to the meaning of the text.
A lot of layers and nuance here, but hopefully this helps untangle a bit!
