Measuring student knowledge and skills

Recommended distribution of reading tasks by situation
Situation
% of total tasks
Personal
28
Educational
28
Occupational
16
Public
28
Total
100
Table 4.
Recommended distribution of reading tasks by continuous text type
Text type
% of continuous texts
% of test
Narrative
20
13
Expository
33
22
Descriptive
20
13
Argumentative/Persuasive
20
13
Injunctive
7
5
Total
100
66

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Measuring Student Knowledge and Skills
36
OECD 1999
aspects – broad understanding, retrieving information and developing an interpretation – focuses on the
degree to which the reader can understand and use information contained primarily within the text. The
remaining tasks (30 per cent) will require the student to reflect on either the content or information pro-
vided in the text or on the structure and form of the text itself. Table 7 provides the distribution of tasks
by text format and aspect.
In determining just what proportion should be constructed-response items, it is necessary to make
some assumptions about the distribution of tasks both on a practical and on a conceptual basis. Table 8
shows the proposed distribution of constructed-response and multiple-choice tasks by the five aspects
of reading.
Table 8 indicates that approximately 45 per cent of the reading literacy assessment will be
constructed-response items that require judgement on the part of the marker. The other 55 per cent will
consist of multiple-choice items and those constructed-response items that require little subjective
judgement on the part of the marker. This table also reveals that while multiple-choice and con-
structed-response items will cut across the five aspects, they will not be distributed evenly. That is, a
larger percentage of multiple-choice items will be associated with the first three aspects of reading.
Table 5.