ISCA- Informational Strategic Cloze Assessment Reflection

The ISCA or the Informational Strategic Cloze Assessment is a helpful tool used to assess comprehension in first, second, and third graders with expository texts.  It is designed to assess the four dimensions of comprehension:  the use of comprehension strategies, knowledge of informational text features, comprehension of graphics in the context of text, and vocabulary comprehension and strategies.  The assessment takes approximately 10 to 15 minutes (depending on the student) which makes this assessment unrealistic to use on an entire class.  Despite this, it may be most effective to apply this tool to students who may have reading or comprehension problems, or to a random set of students to help the teacher find a well-balanced path for whole class instruction.
The assessment consists of two expository texts:  Rocks and Weather.  Both of these texts come with detailed scripts for the teacher, assessment questions and prompts, and scoring sheets.  The student either reads the text (or the teacher reads it to them) and the student is to fill in the missing words using contextual clues, graphic clues, prior knowledge, and other strategies.  When calculating the score, one could look at the overall score which would be the most accurate, or one could analyze particular portions in order to view individual students' needs and comprehension strategies.
This assessment sounds like it would be extremely useful in the classroom.  I would most definitely use a comprehension specific test such as this because comprehension can be a major issue for many readers.  I do know that my target student, Jhon, has comprehension issues when reading text that doesn't have much to do with his own prior knowledge or when text has humor that he doesn't have the language skills to comprehend yet.  When I asked him questions after reading "I See" from the QRI-5, he was able to answer four explicit questions correctly, but when I asked him what the pig was doing at the end of the story (the line was "doing a jig") but he replied with, "he was dancing".  According to the QRI-5, this is correct as an implicit question because he observed the graphic clues of the picture of the pig "dancing".  It would have been interesting to see how Jhon would have done with the ISCA, but I fear that some of the concepts would be still slightly out of reach for him at the moment.
This also reminded me of another moment when one of Jhon's fellow classmates asked if she could read me a book- I will call her Callie.  She brought me a short expository text about trucks.  Each page was a short sentence stating what a truck can do such as mix cement, dump garbage, etc.  I really liked this book because at the end it had a glossary of terms that could be difficult for students like cement, vehicle, dump, etc.  I had Callie attempt to read to me the definitions (those she couldn't read, I read to her).  I told her that I love books with glossaries at the back because it helps me figure out things that I didn't understand before, and that if I would have known it was there before when I didn't understand something, I would have jumped to the back and figured out the words that I didn't know.  I hope that this is a reading strategy that will stick with her as she continues learning to read.