Reports that parents of third-grade students had clear responses to various styles of reporting standardized reading test scores and preferred one that indicated how the child had improved over past performance and that showed the toughest item the child could handle on the test. (FL)

Presents a checklist designed to measure the reading attitudes of beginning readers. Discusses the methods used to develop the instrument. (FL)

Subjects were better able to read essays in good rhetorical form with explicit structural cues than essays in bad form without cues and in deviant paragraph order. Differences depended upon whether the test evaluated macro- or microprocesses (global or local comprehension). Comprehension strategies involving rhetorical cues are discussed.…

Argues that the results of oral reading tests may be interpreted as being more precise and reliable than is warranted and that the amount of error in the results of these tests may make them more variable than is typically assumed. Recommends ways to improve the interpretation of oral reading test scores. (FL)

Reports a study of children's responses to a passage-dependent reading comprehension test. (HTH)

Analysis of the performance of hearing impaired and normal hearing adolescents on a standardized reading test shows that the hearing impaired students attempted significantly more items than their hearing counterparts, but made more errors and significantly more errors that are classified as "nonlinguistic" in nature. (FL)

Analysis of the performance of hearing impaired and normal hearing nine- to eleven-year-old children on a standardized reading test shows that the hearing impaired children tackled significantly more test items than their hearing counterparts and made significantly more errors in achieving similar reading scores. (FL)

Suggests that most countries using an alphabetic language system judge success in beginning reading as the ability to do tasks demonstrating mastery of the same set of skills, but that the types of tasks used to measure these skills and the number of skills tested vary from country to country. (FL)

An approach to assessing context dependence was applied to data from the Nelson-Denny Reading Test. The results suggest that scores on the difficult passages are inflated because the examinees can answer the questions without having to comprehend the passage. (MKM)

Suggests that reading comprehension is a special case of language comprehension; considers the effect of prior knowledge and experience on recall of meanings; points to the role of "scripts" (information accumulated about a situation, word, or concept) in reading comprehension; and outlines implications for teachers. (GT)

Examines the extent and direction of curriculum bias in standardized reading achievement tests by comparing the relative overlap in the contents of five separate reading achievement tests with the content of seven commercial reading series. (HOD)

Seven passages of a published reading comprehension test were administered to college students to compare the regular multiple choice test scores with scores on two forms of a cloze test and with readability formula values. (HOD)

Summarizes key findings from five studies investigating how features of test questions (question format, testing condition, and question type) affect reading comprehension assessment outcomes. Discusses implications for assessment design and instructional practice. (MM)

Compares reading-disabled students' instructional levels yielded by the Ekwall Reading Inventory and the Metropolitan Achievement Test. Finds that both instruments provide instructional-level designations to help place students in appropriate materials but little correspondence between the instructional levels of the two measures. Suggests that…