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ORGANISING THE DOMAIN
38. Reading as it occurs in everyday life is a pervasive and highly diverse activity. In order to
design an assessment that adequately represents the many facets of reading literacy, the domain
is organized according to a set of dimensions. The dimensions will in turn determine the test
design and, ultimately, the evidence about student proficiencies that can be collected and reported.
39. Snow and the RAND group’s (2002) influential framework defined reading comprehension as
the joint outcome of three combined sources of influence: the
reader
, the
text
and the activity,
task
or purpose for reading. Reader, text and task dimensions interact within a broad sociocultural
context, which can be thought of as the diverse range of situations in which reading occurs. For the
purpose of PISA, we adopt a similar view of the dimensions of reading literacy. Figure 1 illustrates
these dimensions. A reader brings a number of
reader factors
to reading, which can include
motivation, prior knowledge, and other cognitive abilities. The reading activity is a function of
text
factors
(
i.e. the text or texts that are available to the reader at a given place and time
). These
factors can include the format of the text, the complexity of the language used, the number of texts
a reader encounters, as well as others. Reading activity is also a function of
task factors (i.e. the
requirements or reasons that motivate the reader's engagement with text)
. Task factors also
include the potential time and other practical constraints, the goals of the task (e.g. read for
pleasure, read for deep understanding or skim) and the complexity or number of tasks to be
completed. Based on their individual characteristics and their perception of text and task
dimensions, readers apply a set of
reading literacy processes
in order to locate, extract information
and construct meaning from texts to achieve the tasks.
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