Students read extended texts, passages longer than just a word or phrase, when their reading comprehension is assessed. These texts may consist of just a few sentences for beginning readers to long passages for more advanced readers. Students who have constructed good representations of a text they have read will be able to remember specific ideas in the text and make inferences from these ideas. The most common form of assessment is question-asking, although many other tasks may be used. Multiple choice questions, short answer questions, cloze tests, and summarizing are examples of tasks used to assess comprehension.

These tasks are used to determine whether a student can recall and make inferences from a text they have read. As noted above, students develop comprehension strategies or procedures in order to be able to recall and use information in a text. Other measures may be used to determine whether students have learned specific comprehension strategies such as question generation (asking yourself questions while reading), error detection (knowing when you do not understand something while reading), and other forms of comprehension monitoring. One way to do this is to ask the learner to think aloud, or talk about what they are reading as they read it.

The NRP distinguishes between two broad types of assessment: standardized tests and informal tests. Just as a teacher may use either teacher-designed tasks or published tests, or both, to assess student reading comprehension, researchers conducting experiments may also use both researcher-designed and standardized tests. For both teachers and researchers, the assessments that they design may be more closely related than standardized tests to what they are teaching or investigating. Teachers in a workplace literacy class in a factory, for example, might teach and construct informal comprehension tests using books, pamphlets, memoranda, and other reading material actually encountered by workers in the factory.