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41. In designing the PISA reading literacy assessment, the two most important considerations are,
first, to
ensure broad coverage
of what students read and for what purposes they read, both in and
outside of school, and, second, to
represent a natural range of difficulty in texts and tasks
. The
PISA reading literacy assessment is built on three major characteristics:
text
– the range of
material that is read;
processes
– the cognitive approach that determines how readers engage with
a text; and
scenarios
– the range of broad contexts or purposes for which
reading takes place with
one or more thematically related texts. Within scenarios are
tasks
–
the assigned goals that
readers must achieve in order to succeed. All three contribute to ensuring
broad coverage
of the
domain. In PISA,
difficulty
of tasks can be varied by manipulating text features and task goals,
which then require deployment of different cognitive processes. Thus, the PISA reading literacy
assessment aims at measuring
students master of reading
processes
(the possible cognitive
approaches of readers to a text) by varying the dimensions of
text
(the range of material that is
read) and
scenarios
(the range of broad contexts or purposes for which reading takes place) with
one or more thematically related texts. While there may be individual differences in
reader
factors
based on the skills and
background of each reader, these are not manipulated in the cognitive
instrument, but are captured through the assessment in the questionnaire.
42. In order to use these three characteristics in designing the assessment, they must be
operationalised. That is, the various values that each of these characteristics can take on must be
specified. This allows test developers to categorise the materials they are working with and the
tasks they construct so that they can then be used to organise the reporting
of the data and to
interpret results.
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