Beyond the Basics: Improve Reading Comprehension with Custom Quizzes
Improve Reading Comprehension with Custom Quizzes
Seeing that 5 WH questions help readers identify key aspects of short passages, I wanted to move beyond the basics and provide flexibility for adding additional questions that target deeper comprehension skills.
That's why I'm excited to share our newest feature: Custom Quiz Questions that let you create questions targeting main idea, inference, detail comprehension, and vocabulary.
Why Detail, Main Idea and Inference Questions Matter
Studies consistently show that students need practice with different levels of comprehension
Detail questions build foundational understanding
Vocabulary questions strengthen word knowledge in context
Main idea questions teach students to synthesize information
Inference questions develop critical thinking by reading between the lines
When students encounter different types of questions over time, they build stronger, more flexible comprehension skills.
Flexibility for Teachers and Parents
Every student is different. Some are ready to tackle inference questions; others still need practice identifying the main idea. That's why customization matters.
With our new feature, you can:
Target specific skills your child is working on
Adjust difficulty as they progress
Focus on vocabulary from their actual reading material
Create questions that match what they're learning in school
Teachers tell me they love having this flexibility. Instead of one-size-fits-all quizzes, they can create assessments that meet each student exactly where they are.
Different Ways to Use This App
The beauty of this app is its flexibility. Here are some ways I use it:
Generate Content on Any Topic I can create passages about whatever topic I want to teach or whatever a student is interested in—dinosaurs, space exploration, their favorite sport, historical events. The AI generates age-appropriate content, and then I can create basic wh or custom quiz questions to check comprehension.
Adapt Online Articles Found a great article online but it's too long or complex? I use an LLM to condense and simplify the content to an appropriate length for focused practice, then paste it into the app. After that, our text-to-voice feature lets students listen and read along, and I can create custom questions targeting the specific comprehension skills they need.
This Leads to Real Writing Skills
Here's what I've noticed: regular practice identifying main ideas and making inferences through quizzes, leads to improvements in writing summaries.
Why? Because student is learning to:
Distinguish important information from details
Understand author's purpose
Connect ideas across a text
Think beyond the literal words on the page
Tool, Not a Teacher
I want to emphasize something important: this app doesn't replace one-on-one coaching or teaching.
I like to use it as a starting point to get the student thinking about what the main idea is and some details about the reading. It primes the student for further discussions paragraph by paragraph, having student verbalize what they think the reading is about, probing them on supporting details, etc.