NCEO - Technical Report 48 - Student Think Aloud Reflections on Comprehensible and Readable Assessment Items

2008

This document reports on research related to large-scale assessments for students with learning disabilities in the area of reading. As part of a process of making assessments more universally designed we examined the role of "readable and comprehensible" test items. In this research, we used think aloud methods to better understand how interventions to improve readability affected student performance. Decreasing word counts in items and making important words bold did not seem to make any difference in student achievement (although students preferred that important words were printed in bold). Vocabulary, however, was a notable factor. Non-construct vocabulary in both the stem and answer choices of items caused difficulty for students as well as words with negative prefixes (e.g., dis). Implications for this research are that readability is correlated with vocabulary and that construct and non-construct vocabulary must be clearly defined in order to increase accessibility of assessments.

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