A Test of Alternative Cloze Test Formats at the Sixth-Grade Level

Helfeldt, John P.; Henk, William A.; Fotos, Angelica

doi:10.1080/00220671.1986.10885680

Cited by 8 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 7 publications

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“…Despite support for the cloze and maze as measures of reading comprehension, researchers have identified many concerns with these measures. For example, the cloze was criticized for being difficult and frustrating for students and only testing surface level skills (Pikulski & Pikulski, 1977) and for lacking alternate-form reliability (Gillingham & Garner, 1992;Helfeldt, Henk, & Fotos, 1986). In regards to the maze, researchers examined issues with the types of distracters, deletion strategy (e.g., fixed, random, lexical), and relevance of context.…”

Section: Problems With the Cloze And Mazementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Research suggests that the fixed deletion ratio used in a cloze task (i.e., every n th word) may result in systematic sampling, potentially resulting in reduced reliability and validity (Helfeldt & Henk, 1985). In an attempt to address concerns about the deletion strategy with cloze measures, researchers explored alternate methods for creating cloze passages such as randomizing the blanks throughout the text and providing a dash for every letter of the target word (Helfeldt et al, 1986). A total random deletion procedure entails removing words at irregular intervals throughout a passage; however, the number of blank spaces between words cannot be controlled.…”

Section: Problems With the Cloze And Mazementioning

confidence: 99%

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Does Passage Context and Word Type Impact Accuracy in Maze Tasks?

Baxter¹

2011

PsycEXTRA Dataset

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Section: Problems With the Cloze And Mazementioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Problems With the Cloze And Mazementioning

confidence: 99%

Does Passage Context and Word Type Impact Accuracy in Maze Tasks?

Baxter¹

2011

PsycEXTRA Dataset

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“…Cloze tasks have been thought to be a proxy for text readability (Helfeldt, Henk, & Fotos, 1986; Hare, 1984), intrasentence and intersentence comprehension (McKenna & Layton, 1990, Shanahan, Kamil, & Tobin, 1982), and local comprehension (Kintsch & Yarbrough, 1982). If cloze were a good proxy, it could be a useful tool for diagnosing reading skill deficits, because it is easy to construct and administer.…”

Section: Cloze Maze and Summary Tasksmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The cloze and maze are similar because they rely on vocabulary and sentence context, but neither relies directly on higher levels of text comprehension (e.g., intersentence and paragraph comprehension). To determine any hierarchical pattern between lower and higher levels of text, we expanded the maze task from its form in earlier research (Helfeldt et al, 1986;Klare, 1984;McKenna & Layton, 1990, Shanahan et al, 1982 in Studies 1 and 2 to include sentence-level and paragraph-level mazes. The sentence-level mazes represent a sentence-level comprehension task.…”

Section: Cloze Maze and Summary Tasksmentioning

confidence: 99%

Readers' Comprehension of Mazes Embedded in Expository Texts

Gillingham

Garner

1992

The Journal of Educational Research

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Cloze is a research and instructional modification of text involving writers' systematic detection of words that readers are then asked to replace. Two studies reported here provided a multiple-choice extension of cloze (called maze) to high school-aged readers. Word, sentence, and paragraph replacement was elicited. It was hypothesized that successful replacement at word level would necessarily precede successful replacement at higher levels. Different patterns of maze accuracy emerged for readers of differing proficiency. The results indicate that maze is a valuable diagnostic tool; it is easy and quick to administer, and it suggests different teaching strategies at specific reading skill levels.

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“…These were primarily nouns. The initial letter of each deleted word was provided as cues (Helfeldt et al, 1986) with solid lines of equal length (Greenewald, 1981). Scoring used classical test theory sum of items correct, with no adjustment made for word difficulty.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

A comparative study of two interventions to support reading comprehension in primary-aged students

Sorrell

Brown

2018

IJCED

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Purpose-The purpose of this paper is to explore the explicit teaching of information text schema with vocabulary instruction to primary-aged students in Hong Kong international education. Design/methodology/approach-Data were collected through three quasi-experimental studies with different age groups and participants. Each study divided participants into two randomly assigned groups, either informational texts (IT) or vocabulary building (VB). Impact was evaluated with gain scores on a standardized reading comprehension test and researcher-designed cloze tests of fiction and nonfiction passages. Findings-The explicit teaching of IT can benefit student reading comprehension from an early age, particularly to first language (L1) English students and possibly second language (L2) English learners. School reading programmes should include opportunities for students to experience IT (nonfiction) and fiction materials, and build their vocabulary through incidental learning and explicit teaching. For IT, they should be exposed to: layoute.g., headings, sub-headings, glossary, and index; and contentphotographs and specific/technical vocabulary. For fiction-based texts and VB, the following themes should be covered by younger aged students: antonyms, synonyms, and affixes. Research limitations/implications-Several limitations apply to this study which will need to be addressed in future studies. These include: the random sampling of students from the overall student population was not an option, given the necessity of voluntary participation and avoiding disruption to school routines. This study used meta-analysis to aggregate results across multiple comparisons largely because of the extremely small samples available. The data show large standard errors as a consequence of small numbers of participants. Hence, the current results, notwithstanding the power of meta-analysis, need to be validated with much larger samples in future studies. Originality/value-This paper suggests that greater comprehension and cloze performance among L1 students was found due to the teaching of IT compared to vocabulary training, with the reverse result for L2 English learners.

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A Test of Alternative Cloze Test Formats at the Sixth-Grade Level

Cited by 8 publications

References 7 publications

Does Passage Context and Word Type Impact Accuracy in Maze Tasks?

Does Passage Context and Word Type Impact Accuracy in Maze Tasks?

Readers' Comprehension of Mazes Embedded in Expository Texts

A comparative study of two interventions to support reading comprehension in primary-aged students

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