On the theory and measurement of reading comprehension

Abstract

Whenever we have had what we thought was a good idea about reading comprehension, we've generally found that John Carroll has had it first. He may not agree with what we have said, but he has influenced our thinking enormously. We would like to thank Jim Pichert, Al Moe, Glenn Kleiman, Joe Jenkins, and Nancy Stein for their comments on earlier drafts of this paper. They deserve much credit for anything of merit to be found in the paper. This paper was written while the first author was on leave at the Center for the Study of Reading, University of Illinois. The Center is supported by the National Institute of Education under Contract No. US-NIE-C-400-76-0116. Comprehension Theory and Measurement AbstractThis paper suggests that reading comprehension must involve an interaction between the reader's world knowledge and the incoming linguistic message.We call this the minimal comprehension principle. After examining the measurement of reading comprehension from the perspective of the minimal comprehension principle, we conclude that most existing tests of reading comprehension are likely to be unsatisfactory for the purposes of assessing educational gain and diagnosing reading difficulty. We suggest several techniques which might be more suitable for these purposes. Comprehension Theory and Measurement 2On the Theory and Measurement of Reading ComprehensionThe purpose of this paper is to review recent developments in the theory of comprehension and to derive implications from this work for the measurement of reading comprehension. Many recent commentaries on the topic of comprehension (e.g., Otto, 1971;Simons, 1971;Stauffer, 1971; R. L. Thorndike, 1973Thorndike, -1974Tuinman, 1971) have lamented the fact that our theoretical knowledge of the comprehension process has not progressed very far beyond the observations of early reading researchers such as Huey (1908), James (1890), Richards (1929) or E. L. Thorndike (1917).While the observations of these early theorists contain many insights into the processes involved in comprehension, our view is that real progress toward the development of a psychologically valid theory of comprehension has emerged only recently from attempts to develop process models of human cognitive functioning.In the paper which follows, we will propose a minimal principle of comprehension which we have derived from recent theoretical and empirical work on the comprehension process. This principle, we believe, must be part of any serious theory of comprehension. In subsequent sections we will review several types of models of the comprehension process and show how our minimal principle is integrated within them, derive the implications of the minimal principle for the measurement of comprehension, and propose alternatives to the existing methods of measuring reading comprehension. Comprehension Theory and Measurement 3 A Minimal Principle of Reading ComprehensionThe purpose of this section is to present arguments in support of a minimal principle of comprehension. Our use of the term "minimal" ...

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