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BRIEF RESEARCH REPORT article
Front. Educ.
Sec. Assessment, Testing and Applied Measurement
Volume 10 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/feduc.2025.1524561
Reading Comprehension Assessment for Student Selection: Advantages of Text Availability in Terms of Validity
Provisionally accepted- University of Graz, Graz, Austria
Reading comprehension assessments are widely used in university entrance exams across various fields. These tests vary in text content, answer format, and whether the text remains available while the questions are being answered. We explored how the availability of the text impacts the psychometric quality of the test and what is the best format for assessing reading comprehension in university admissions. We developed a test with four educational texts and 88 questions. A group of 107 university students was tested on two texts under two conditions: with and without text availability, using identical multiple-choicetrue/false questions for both scenarios. Results show similar difficulties in both versions, but slightly higher item-total correlations and internal consistencies in the text-unavailable condition, although this varied between texts. The text-available condition showed better validity, with expected correlations with participants' verbal intelligence and language scores. Overall, allowing text access during the test appears to be advantageous for assessing reading comprehension in university admissions.
Keywords: reading comprehension, student selection, psychometric quality, validity, text availability
Received: 07 Nov 2024; Accepted: 27 Jan 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Sedlmayr and Weissenbacher. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence:
Barbara Weissenbacher, University of Graz, Graz, Austria
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