Clozing in on reading comprehension: A deep cloze test of global inference making

Research output: Contribution to journalJournal articlepeer-review

Traditional cloze tests (such as the CBM-maze) may be poor measures of comprehension processes beyond the single sentence level. This paper presents an alternative, a deep cloze test with gaps that are strategically chosen to assess comprehension beyond the sentence level. To fill each gap, the reader has to draw global cohesion inferences during reading. A study with 83 adult students found support for the validity of the deep cloze test. It contributed unique variance to global reading comprehension as measured with a conventional test even after controlling for sentence-level cloze, word decoding, and vocabulary knowledge. The deep cloze also explained all of the shared variance between reading comprehension and a topic identification task designed to require global comprehension. Future studies may explore how the deep cloze format can be used to tap other component processes of reading comprehension.
Original languageEnglish
JournalReading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal
Volume35
Issue number5
Pages (from-to)1221-1237
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2022

ID: 289468319