The Relative Merits of Item Transformations and the Cloze Procedure for the Measurement of Reading Comprehension

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Abstract
The relative merits and potential of item transformations and the cloze procedure are evaluated. The two strategies for assessing reading comprehension were reviewed in terms of three criteria: (1) the extent to which literal comprehension skills are validly measured; (2) the extent to which the issue of passage dependency is addressed; (3) utility for classroom teachers, reading specialists, and evaluators of reading programs. The analysis revealed that the cloze procedure offers several distinct advantages over six sentence-derived transformations. They include the assessment of both semantic and syntactic relationships, dependency on contextual clues, and ease of development, administration, and scoring. Both item generation methods were applicable to only content domains that could be decomposed into passages and sentences. Unfortunately, this limitation encompasses many of the functional skills and minimum competencies that are in the process of being measured in 38 states.