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Joe Magliano
Keith Millis
News Release
Contact: Tom Parisi, NIU Office of Public Affairs
(815) 753-3635
November 2, 2004
NIU psychologists have a new read on comprehension
DeKalb, Ill. — Two Northern Illinois University psychology professors have received a $1.5 million grant to develop an automated online test that could revolutionize how reading comprehension is assessed in the future.
The test, dubbed the R-Sat, for Reading Strategy Assessment Tool, will measure not only how well college and high school students understand the text they read but also pinpoint the areas where comprehension breaks down as students are interpreting the material.
“We’re trying to get into the window of comprehension as it is happening,” Professor Keith Millis says. “This will be a revolutionary way to assess reading skills.”
Millis and Professor Joe Magliano are developing the R-Sat. The U.S. Department of Education’s Institute for Educational Sciences is funding the pair’s four-year research project, which will produce a Web-based comprehension test that eventually could be used by students and educators worldwide.
The NIU researchers say students, even at the college level, have a wide range of reading comprehension skills.
“Your success in college is really contingent on being a good active reader,” Magliano says. “Readers who adopt a low standard of coherence read passively, finding a sparse representation acceptable. Readers who have a high standard employ a search for meaning in which they construct a coherent understanding of what the text is about. These readers use a variety of reading strategies to understand the text.”
By having test subjects answer impromptu questions or think aloud while reading passages, the researchers identify the strategies that indicate deep or superficial comprehension.
“Passive readers, for example, tend to answer the impromptu questions by repeating or paraphrasing what they’ve just read,” Magliano says. “Active readers tend to explain the material they’ve read in the context of the entire passage.”
R-SAT will identify basic reading strategies and the extent to which the reader is actively engaged with the text. The online test will build upon new research that uses various computational approaches to analyze student responses solicited at critical points during the reading process.
Standard multiple choice tests also measure reading comprehension but have serious limitations, the researchers say. Because multiple-choice tests measure comprehension after reading, they are subject to test-taking strategies and processes.
“A test taker who doesn’t understand the information still might guess right,” Magliano says. “A student might also first read the questions before reading a passage of text, or find that a listed answer to a question triggers the correct answer.”
Millis adds: “Multiple-choice tests are easy and cheap, and you can test the heck out of people. But they don’t really assess the deep comprehension that is required for understanding complex literature, textbooks or societal issues. The standard tests also fail to identify how to improve a reader’s comprehension, which requires recognition of specific strategies that are weak or lacking.”
The researchers hope to have the Web-based prototype assembled in two to three years. It will assess readers in their late adolescence and initially be tested on students at NIU. Eventually, Magliano and Millis hope to develop a similar tool for testing students at the primary grades as well.
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