BACKGROUND: important reading performance measurements are related to how and to what extent a child understands a written text. AIM: to study the performance of primary school (Ensino Fundamental) students in reading comprehension tasks according to the variables grade and type of school. METHOD: 160 students from the 3rd to the 6th grades were screened and later evaluated based on the retelling and question answering about a given text. RESULTS: students of the 5th and 6th grades of private schools presented a better performance on issues related to implicit information when compared to students of public schools. The overall analysis of the educational level revealed, through the retelling task, a better performance of the 6th grade students in terms of the number of present macro propositions and a low performance of the 5th grade students in terms of the achieved comprehension level, in both types of school. When answering text-derived questions, the 4th, 5th and 6th grade students performed better than the 3rd grade students regarding explicit questions. When considering implicit questions, the 4th grade students performed better than all the other grades, in both types of school. These results gave evidence to the influence of the different texts used in each grade. CONCLUSION: the 5th and 6th grades from private schools were the only grades that performed better when compared to public schools in general, regarding answering implicit knowledge questions. All students achieved some level of reading comprehension.
Evaluation; Reading; Comprehension
