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and the degree to which a text appears to be
advertising or comes from a reputable source.
Box 3. Text availability and its impact on comprehension in the design of tasks
In the last decade, there has been some debate whether memory-based measures of reading
comprehension, i.e. answering comprehension question while the text is not available to
students after initial reading, might be a better indicator of students’ reading comprehension
skills than questions with text availability. From a theoretical point of view, arguments can be
made for both, with- and without-text availability questions. Answering comprehension
questions with a text might be more ecologically valid because many reading settings
(especially in the digital age) potentially allow the reader to refer back to the text. In addition, if
the text is not available to students, their performance on the comprehension questions might
be confounded with their memory skills, i.e. their ability to remember the content of the text. On
the other hand, answering comprehension questions without text availability is also a common
reading situation (e.g. commenting on a newspaper article over lunch that has been read in the
morning) and
might be less confounded by students’ motivational and test taking strategies.
Empirically, recent studies (Ozuru et al., 2007; Schroeder, 2011) do provide some evidence
that comprehension questions without text availability might indeed be more sensitive to the
quality of the processes that are executed while students are reading a text and the strength of
the resulting memory representation. At the same time, however, both kinds of measures are
highly correlated and are thus difficult to dissociate empirically. At present, therefore, there is
not enough evidence that justifies any major changes in the way PISA is administered.
However, it is encouraged to include further measures in the analysis, e.g. time on task, time of
initial reading of a text, etc., in order to further explore this issue.
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