Full Goal

After listening to a 3- to 5-minute grade-level narrative read aloud once, given a mix of literal (who/what/where) and inferential (why/how) WH-questions, [Student] will answer questions with topic-relevant, story-grounded responses with 80% accuracy on literal questions and 60% accuracy on inferential questions across 3 narratives, as measured by SLP scoring against a story-element rubric.

Individualization Guidance

Before using this goal, verify:

• Split criteria are intentional. Literal recall and inference draw on different processes. Combining them into a single “75% accuracy” target obscures the profile and makes progress monitoring less useful. Keep them separate.
• Narrative selection. Use narratives at the student’s instructional level — not above. A “comprehension failure” on a text that is two grade levels too hard tells you about decoding-by-proxy load, not comprehension.
• Question stems must be controlled. “Why did the character feel sad?” requires both inference and emotion vocabulary. If your inferential items consistently fail on emotion vocabulary, that’s an expressive lexicon issue feeding into your inference score.
• Listening vs. reading. This goal targets listening comprehension specifically. If the student is also a struggling reader, a parallel reading-comprehension goal may be needed — write it separately.
• Modality of response. A student who knows the answer but can’t formulate it expressively will look like they have a comprehension deficit. Allow multiple-choice or pointing for inference probes if expressive language is also a concern, and note this in your data.

Clinical Notes

The 80%/60% split mirrors what is observed clinically: students with language disorders typically retain literal information at near-typical rates while underperforming on inferential questions that require integrating across sentences. Tracking these separately gives you a sensitive index of progress on the inferencing side, which is the harder skill to remediate.

Use a story-grammar rubric (character, setting, initiating event, internal response, plan, action, consequence) rather than a “right/wrong” key. A response that references the wrong character but uses correct story structure is clinically meaningful — it tells you the student is engaging with the narrative, not guessing.

Comprehension of narrative discourse is a strong predictor of later reading comprehension. This is a high-leverage goal in elementary grades even when the immediate complaint is “doesn’t follow along in class.”

Related Goals

• Follow Multi-Step Classroom Directions — sentence-level comprehension under classroom conditions
• Narrative Macrostructure in Personal and Story Retells — expressive counterpart at the discourse level