scholarly journals Reading Comprehension Tests for Children: Test Equating and Specific Age-Interval Reports

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patrícia Silva Lúcio ◽  
Fausto Coutinho Lourenço ◽  
Hugo Cogo-Moreira ◽  
Deborah Bandalos ◽  
Carolina Alves Ferreira de Carvalho ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Reading Comprehension ◽  
Irt Model ◽  
Bivariate Correlation ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
True Score Equating ◽  
Alternate Forms ◽  
Random Groups Design ◽  
Observed Score ◽  
Random Groups ◽  
5Th Grade

Equating is used to directly compare alternate forms of tests. We describe the equating of two alternative forms of a reading comprehension test for Brazilian children (2nd to 5th grade), Form A (n = 427) and Form B (n = 321). We employed non-equivalent random groups design with internal anchor items. Local independence was attested via standardized residual Pearson's bivariate correlation. First, from 176 items, we selected 42 in each form (33 unique and 9 in common) using 2PL model, a one-dimensional item response theory (IRT) model. Using the equateIRT package for R, the anchor items were used to link both forms. Linking coefficients were estimated under two different methods (Haebara and Stocking–Lord), resulting in scores equating by two methods: observed score equating (OSE) and true score equating (TSE). We provided reference-specific age-intervals for the sample. The final version was informative for a wide range of theta abilities. We concluded that the forms could be used interchangeably.

scholarly journals JIGSAW II: An Effective Strategy to Develop Reading Comprehension Among School Children

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (S1-Dec2020) ◽  
pp. 30-33
Author(s):  
Sindhu Thamban
Keyword(s):  
High School ◽  
Reading Comprehension ◽  
High School Students ◽  
Teaching Method ◽  
Group Discussion ◽  
School Students ◽  
Team Members ◽  
Learning Techniques ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Significant Difference

The Jigsaw II, one form of Cooperative learning techniques is an efficient strategy to use in a language classroom. The basic activities include 1) Reading with team members 2) Expert group discussion 3) Team members report 4) Test 5) Team recognition. The jigsaw II strategy is easyto implement and works well with a wide range of students.Previous researches related to Jigsaw II shows that it is more powerful and effective and appropriate in situations where learning is from text based materials. Reviews related to the strategy shows that no researches have been carried out to develop the reading comprehension of the high school students, particularly in the Indian context. Hence through this paper an attempt has been made by the researcher to check the effectiveness of Jigsaw II in developing the reading comprehension of High school students.The study statistically revealed that there is significant difference in the reading comprehension achievement of the students who were taught by using the traditional method and to those taught by using the Jigsaw II strategy. In accordance with the qualitative and quantitative findings attained it was found that Jigsaw II was found to be more effective than the traditional teaching method in developing the reading comprehension of high school students.

scholarly journals Using Eye-Tracking Measures to Predict Reading Comprehension

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Diane Caroline Meziere ◽  
Lili Yu ◽  
Erik Reichle ◽  
Titus von der Malsburg ◽  
Genevieve McArthur
Keyword(s):  
Reading Comprehension ◽  
Eye Tracking ◽  
Cognitive Skills ◽  
Common Good ◽  
Sentence Comprehension ◽  
Reading Speed ◽  
Task Demands ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Comprehension Tests ◽  
Reading Comprehension Tests

Research on reading comprehension assessments suggests that they measure overlapping but not identical cognitive skills. In this paper, we examined the potential of eye-tracking as a tool for assessing reading comprehension. We administered three widely-used reading comprehension tests with varying task demands to 79 typical adult readers while monitoring their eye movements. In the York Assessment for Reading Comprehension (YARC), participants were given passages of text to read silently, followed by comprehension questions. In the Gray Oral Reading Test (GORT-5), participants were given passages of text to read aloud, followed by comprehension questions. In the sentence comprehension subtest of the Wide Range Achievement Test (WRAT-4), participants were given sentences with a missing word to read silently, and had to provide the missing word (i.e., a cloze task). Results from linear models predicting comprehension scores from eye-tracking measures yielded different patterns of results between the three tests. Models with eye-tracking measures always explained significantly more variance compared to baseline models with only reading speed, with R-squared 4 times higher for the YARC, 3 times for the GORT, and 1.3 times for the WRAT. Importantly, despite some similarities between the tests, no common good predictor of comprehension could be identified across the tests. Overall, the results suggest that reading comprehension tests do not measure the same cognitive skills to the same extent, and that participants adapted their reading strategies to the tests’ varying task demands. Finally, this study suggests that eye-tracking may provide a useful alternative for measuring reading comprehension.

Analyzing the linguistic complexity of German learner language in a reading comprehension task

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Zarah Weiss ◽  
Detmar Meurers
Keyword(s):  
Reading Comprehension ◽  
Language Proficiency ◽  
Complexity Analysis ◽  
College Level ◽  
Complexity Measures ◽  
Linguistic Complexity ◽  
Foreign Language Learners ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Linguistic Methods ◽  
Learner Language

Abstract While traditionally linguistic complexity analysis of learner language is mostly based on essays, there is increasing interest in other task types. This is crucial for obtaining a broader empirical basis for characterizing language proficiency and highlights the need to advance our understanding of how task and learner properties interact in shaping the linguistic complexity of learner productions. It also makes it important to determine which complexity measures generalize well across which tasks. In this paper, we investigate the linguistic complexity of answers to reading comprehension questions written by foreign language learners of German at the college level. Analyzing the corpus with computational linguistic methods identifying a wide range of complexity features, we explore which linguistic complexity analyses can successfully be performed for such short answers, how learner proficiency impacts the results, how generalizable they are across different contexts, and how the quality of the underlying analysis impacts the results.

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