READING COMPREHENSION ASSESSMENT
Introduction:
Measuring reading comprehension may be complex, because of all the characteristics we need to take into account when designing tasks to measure students’ ability to decode written messages, to infer meaning from context, to use the necessary strategies to comprehend the whole message. According to Dr. Melissa Farrall different reading tests measure different types of reading skills.
Comprehensive assessment in reading should include: word recognition, silent reading comprehension and oral reading comprehension to demonstrate the development of micro skills such as: understanding the scrip of language, deducing meaning and the use of unfamiliar lexical items, understanding the cohesion devices, interpreting text and distinguishing the main idea.
Another important aspect to consider is the time given to answer the test, given the difficulties test takers may encounter trying to get a meaning out of the reading; it would be a good idea to assign about an hour depending on the type of text it would be a little shorter or longer.
Abstract:
In this document I suggest a set of assessment tasks to be applied to a group of beginner learners from high school education, each of these is designed to measure a certain micro skill in reading comprehension, considering the learners previous knowledge, about the language, the world and the written code.
The main purpose of this sample test is to measure understanding the main idea of the text by asking comprehension questions. I will avoid other kinds of tasks such as cloze items since they just measure how much test takers can remember about the exact words in certain passage. I will also avoid true false questions since they can be answered at random and even get some correctly guessed. At the end of the questions, I suggest to set a summary task in which test takers choose among three options, the one which best summarizes the whole reading.
Keywords: assessment, measure, comprehension, skills, cloze test, summary, reading.
READING COMPREHENSION EVALUATION
TABLE OF SPECIFICATIONS
No. of students: 22 Age: 17-18 Level: Upper Beginner
Reading material: Chapter 1 a strange meeting of the book ‘’How I met myself’’ David A. Hill. Cambridge Readers. Level 3. Cambridge University Press. 2001
| Purpose | Micro skills | Type of item | No. of items | Percentage | Estimated time |
| To measure learners ability to comprehend reading in the form of a story. | Understanding the main idea Deducing lexical meanings from context Understanding the cohesion devices. | Multiple choice questions | 5 | 15% each | 10 min |
| To measure learners ability to distinguish important information | Understanding the main idea | | 1 | 20% | 5 min |
| To measure learners ability to summarize the important information extracting the main idea | Understanding the main idea and express it in the written code | Open writing | 1 | 20% | 10 min |
Test takers characteristics:
The students who will take the test are adolescents that study in a technical high school; they were very reluctant towards reading at the beginning of the course. However step by step they have learned to enjoy some kind of readings as short stories. As they have more experience in these kinds of readings I decided to test them with one of these. I consider this story very interesting for my students since there is suspension and may cause expectation and a desire to continue reading. The language of this extract is not difficult nor so simple, there may be some words students do not understand but which are easily inferred by context that is one of the micro skills I have been working with as well as some cohesive devices which help us to follow the story.
Report:
The students’ reactions towards the test were of some anxiety at the beginning, once I told them it was just an activity they were more relaxed. They normally relate tests as something difficult to achieve, so I prefer to call them exercises.
I assigned them fifteen minutes to read the story before they started to answer the questions, they finished before I expected. The results were not excellent but not bad either. The main difficulty they had in the first part was that they did not understand the word colleague, so may answered that he was argued with his boss which is a word they are familiar with. In the second part of the test some answered with the wrong option, many chose the letter a, which would be acceptable just for one detail, he was not Hungarian. Just some of them understood that he was arrived there, so if he arrived, then he was from another place. They needed to assimilate that. In the third part most of them answered correctly, however it was difficult to me to interpret their writings.
Observations:
Students tried to understand all the information in the story, I observed when there were a difficulty in understanding because of his body language. Sometimes they went back the reading; we can see it in their face when there is something they want to recheck because of a gap of information necessary to assimilate the meaning. We can also observe when someone wants to peek at a partner’s answer to be sure mainly if it is individual and it is not allowed to share answers.
Conclusion:
Measuring reading comprehension needs a good plan, we need to know exactly what we want to measure, what skills are we going to weight, what is the purpose of it, what kind of items will be set in the test, what percentage are we going to assign to each one and how much time will we give to answer.
In this reading there are many features to exploit for those who want to test other students abilities, for example what happened before what, or to interpret it may cause different suppositions in different students, we can ask the student to continue the story or to give a rationale of the event. The options are many, but the more important thing is to know exactly what we want students to do and that they have that knowledge to complete it successfully, if not it would be better to simplify the exercises according to their level.
APENDIX 1.
HOW I MET MYSELF
A strange meeting
I was walking home from my office one January evening. It was a Monday. The weather was very cold, and there were some low clouds around the tops of the buildings. Once I’d left the main road, there weren’t many people in the dark, narrow streets of Budapest’s Thirteenth District. Everything was very quiet. It felt as if the city was waiting for something.
As I walked I thought about what had happened at work. I had argued with one of the Hungarians I worked with. It was the first serious problem since I’d arrived. I was trying to think what to do about it, and I was also hoping that my wife, Andrea, had made one of her nice hot soups for dinner.
After about five minutes it started to snow heavily, so that the streets were soon completely white. As I was walking along a very dark part of one street there was the noise of a door shutting loudly inside a building. Then I heard the sound of someone running.
Suddenly, the street door opened and a man came out of it and ran straight into me. I fell over into the snow, shouting something like, ‘Hey, watch where you’re going!’-my words were loud in the empty street. The man turned to look at me for a moment. ‘Sorry’, he said very quietly, in Hungarian, before walking quickly away.
What I saw at that moment, in the dark winter street was very strange, and I felt very afraid. Because what I saw was me. My face looking down at me. My mouth saying sorry.
APENDIX 2.
Sample questions:
I. Instructions: Underline the correct answer
1. - Where was he walking?
a) In a street
b) In a path
c) In a little park
d) In his house
2. - Who did he argue with?
a) A friend
b) His wife
c) His boss
d) A colleague
3. - When did it start snowing?
a) In the morning
b) In the afternoon
c) In the evening
d) At night
4. - Why did the man fall over into the snow?
a) Because he was very tired
b) Because he was drunk
c) Because a man ran into him
d) Because he slipped in the snow
5. - How many people were there in the street?
a) A lot o people
b) Just police officers
c) Some tourists
d) Nobody
II. Instructions: choose the statement that best summarizes the story.
a) A Hungarian man was walking when suddenly a man ran into him making him fell over the snow, this man was himself.
b) Someone meet a person in an accident realizing he was that person.
c) A man was running when he crashed with another man who results to be someone he had met in the past.
III. Instructions: Write the main idea of the text with your own words.
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REFERENCES:
by Dr. Melissa Farrall at: http://www.wrightslaw.com/info/test.read.farrall.htm
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