Date of Award

8-1980

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts in Education

Department

Education

First Advisor

Daniel J. Rocchio

Second Advisor

Jeanne Donovan

Abstract

In order to systematize the item writing procedure for developing reading comprehension measures for the regular classroom, the major purpose of this study was to compare the reliability, validity, and difficulty of a matching lexical cloze test, two traditional or passage-question group informal reading tests, and a standardized measure of reading comprehension, the Stanford Achievement Test. One of the traditional group informals was composed of two reading sections, each followed by 20- 25 literal comprehension questions which were developed by Finn in his dissertation of 1973. The other traditional group informal was composed of two reading selections taken from a Scott-Foresman reading series followed by 20 questions based on Bormuth's Wh-rote question format developed in 1970. The matching lexical cloze tests deleted only nouns, verbs, and verbals and the correct choices were listed at the bottom of each 100-125 word selection along with six distractors for each passage . Thirty-five eighth grade students took all four types of silent reading tests . A language arts teacher also ranked the reading ability of these students and judged their ability to read the informal passages . Results indicated t hat the matching lexical cloze test provides a good group estimate of a student's instructional reading level and a pears to be an objective, easily developed method for assessing student ability to comprehend instructional text materials .

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License

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