Testing reading through summary: investigating summary completion tasks for assessing reading comprehension ability

Abstract

This volume reports on a series of empirical studies that investigated the development and trialling of text-removed summary completion tasks and discusses the correlation of these tasks with results from independent measures to validate text-removed summary completion as a measure of reading comprehension ability. Findings from the empirical research reported in the volume suggest it is possible to develop a satisfactory summary of a text which will be consistent with most readers’ mental representation if their reading of the text is adequately contextualised within some purposeful activity. The conversion of the summary into a text-removed summary completion task provides a means of reconciling more closely the practice of assessing reading comprehension ability with current theory about the nature of comprehension.