Measuring student knowledge and skills

Test rubric: This term refers to the characteristics of the questions and directives in the tasks that
are given to the students, the response formats that are used to elicit the responses, and the mark-
ing guides that are applied to the responses that students make. Generally speaking, the ques-
tions and directives will refer to a goal or purpose which the readers are asked to assume while
they are reading and interacting with texts. The reading literacy survey will not rely solely on the
use of multiple-choice formats but will include open-ended tasks which will be designed to engage
the students in a broader and deeper range of processes and strategies.
In order to use these three main task characteristics in designing the assessment and, later, in inter-
preting the results, they must be operationalised. That is, the various values that each of these charac-
teristics can take on must be specified. This will allow item developers to categorise the materials that
they are working with and the tasks that they construct so that these can then be used to organise the
reporting of the data along with the interpretation of results. These variables can also be used to specify
what proportions of the assessment ought to come from each category. What role the variables do play in
interpretation is, of course, an empirical question, but they cannot play any role if they are not built into
the design of the assessment.
Situations
Situation refers more to the uses for which an author composes a text than to location or setting.
While it is the intent to assess both the kinds of reading that are associated with school and those that
occur beyond the school door, the manner in which the situation is specified cannot simply be based on
the place where the reading activity is carried out. For example, textbooks are read both in schools and
in homes, and the process and purpose probably differ little from one setting to another. Also, as
Hubbard (1989) has shown, some kinds of reading usually associated with out-of-school settings for
children, such as rules for clubs and records of games, often take place unofficially at school as well.

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