Validating a Reading Comprehension Assessment for College Students: Preliminary Findings

Area of Science:

• Educational Psychology
• Cognitive Science
• Reading Comprehension Research

Background:

• Accurate reading comprehension assessment is crucial for college students' academic success.
• Existing assessments may not fully capture the cognitive processes involved in college-level reading.
• Understanding the role of background knowledge in reading comprehension is an ongoing area of research.

Purpose of the Study:

• To validate a new reading comprehension assessment tool, MOCCA-College, for college students.
• To investigate the relationship between background knowledge connections and comprehension accuracy on MOCCA-College.
• To establish the criterion validity of MOCCA-College using standardized reading tests.

Main Methods:

• Recruited 63 college students from diverse educational programs.
• Administered MOCCA-College Online, followed by face-to-face think-aloud and recall tasks.
• Utilized standardized assessments: Nelson-Denny Reading Test (NDRT) and Test of Word Reading Efficiency (TOWRE-2).

Main Results:

• Correct MOCCA-College answers correlated with meaningful connections to background knowledge.
• Incorrect answers were associated with irrelevant background knowledge connections.
• MOCCA-College efficiency (seconds per correct answer) showed criterion validity against NDRT and TOWRE-2 scores.

Conclusions:

• MOCCA-College effectively assesses college students' reading comprehension.
• The assessment distinguishes between meaningful and irrelevant background knowledge use during reading.
• Further research can refine assessment development for individual differences in college readers.