What is “cloze” and how is it used in SRI to create questions? Is it a good measure of reading comprehension?
In its simplest form, cloze is a deletion procedure used to measure syntactic and semantic understanding. In the basic cloze test, after the eighth or tenth word of a selection, every seventh or tenth word (the value varies depending on the approach) is deleted, including function words such as articles, conjunctions, etc.. The student’s task is to restore the deleted words. SRI does not use a strict cloze procedure to create questions. No words are deleted from the passages that students are presented. Only the embedded completion items, described above, omit a word or phrase, and the rules for this missing word differ from those used to create traditional cloze reading test passages. The blanks or missing phrases are designed to assess specific aspects of a student’s comprehension of the reading selection and thereby provide a much more complete and in-depth measure of reading comprehension than conventional cloze test items.
