Assessing Comprehension During Reading with the Reading Strategy Assessment Tool (RSAT)

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Educational Technology
• Reading Comprehension Research

Background:

• Traditional reading comprehension tests often fail to assess the inferential and strategic processes crucial for understanding text.
• Developing assessments that capture these dynamic comprehension processes during reading is a significant challenge.

Purpose of the Study:

• To evaluate the feasibility of the Reading Strategy Assessment Tool (RSAT), an automated, computer-based system for measuring reading comprehension and strategy use.
• To determine if RSAT can accurately assess both the outcome of comprehension and the underlying strategies employed by readers.

Main Methods:

• The RSAT presents passages sentence by sentence, followed by direct or indirect questions about the reader's understanding.
• Indirect question responses are analyzed for keywords related to comprehension processes.
• Direct question responses are evaluated based on content overlap with ideal answers, assessing emerging comprehension.

Main Results:

• The RSAT demonstrated the ability to predict reading comprehension measures comparable to standardized tests.
• RSAT-derived variables showed significant correlations with human ratings of comprehension.
• The study provides a proof of concept for an automated tool assessing both comprehension and strategies.

Conclusions:

• The Reading Strategy Assessment Tool (RSAT) is a viable method for assessing reading comprehension and strategy use.
• Automated assessment of reading comprehension strategies during the reading process is achievable.
• RSAT offers a novel approach to understanding how readers construct meaning from text.