At my new school there is a MAZE reading comprehension test the students take and I felt I needed to teach that strategy so they could apply it on a test, but there were no materials to do so.
I searched high and low for MAZE comprehension passages online and found few to none for free. Of course, because I think it is crazy that people expect us poor teachers to pay for these resources I kept searching.
A co-teacher of mine would write her own but of course not a whole reading passage but a couple sentences for her students to practice on homework. This takes so much time and as teachers, our time is precious! After days of searching I finally found a website that you can paste a fluency passage in and it will generate a MAZE reading passage from it. I felt like the clouds to heaven had parted. I was so excited!
MAZE Passage Generator (Click Here)
I have been using it to assign as homework and as a weekly practice test. Discussing strategies to picking the correct word and having practice I have seen major improvement in scores.
- What is MAZE comprehension?
- It is a task that measures how well students understand text that they read silently. After the first sentence, words in the reading passage are replaced with the correct word and two distracters. Students choose the word from among the three choices that fits best with the sentence. The MAZE is different from traditional comprehension that is based completely on text.
- Why test MAZE?
- Capable readers understand syntax of what they read and meanings of words as they are used in the text. Some readers with reading difficulties can’t comprehend what they read well enough to choose words based on semantic and syntactic accuracy. The MAZE reading assessment identifies these students and measures the changes in their reading behaviors as a result of instruction and practice.
Example of a MAZE scored:
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