Assessing Online Reading Comprehension

Internet is the place where people use do find information nowadays. We use internet to do many different things, as getting general or specific information about a topic, shopping, planning trips, communicating, and an endless list of other activities. Very frequently, “online reading comprehension is specifically focused to solve a particular problem or answer a particular question” (Leu et al., 2013, p. 222). This inquiry-based activity, that is recurrent at the Internet, requires some skills as

•  Identifying important problems

•  Locating useful information related to the problems that are identified

•  Critically evaluating information that is found, often online

•  Synthesizing multiple sources of online information and evaluating arguments to determine a solution

•  Communicating effectively to others with digital technologies

•  Monitoring and evaluating the results of decisions, modifying these as needed (Leu et al., 2013, p.221)

It also demands new kills and strategies, as the ones involved in the process of generating a key word entry in a search engine, and monitoring the search process, for instance.

We need to prepare our students to be autonomous learners, to work collaboratively and to create new knowledge. This requires being a good online reader, which means that teachers need to prepare their students to deal efficiently with multiple source material, evaluating the source as well as the quality of the information, logically integrating this material, understanding the different perspectives and point of view they convey, building their own position, finding evidence to support this position and rejecting different ones.

The ORCA Project measures the main competences involved in online reading: locating, evaluating and synthesizing information and it still assess how the students communicate. This project already presented very rich results that will certainly be “useful in helping teachers and parents see and understand the types of higher level thinking and the types of literacy practices that are important to online research and comprehension. […] Good instruction depends on knowing what students can do and what they have difficulty doing.” (Leu et al., 2013, p. 232).

Besides detecting the skills students’ have already developed, as well as the ones they still need to develop, this project created and validated a methodology of online comprehension assessment that can be used or inspire teachers to create their own assessments that they can use in their classes to evaluate or to scaffold the students.

I am still not comfortable with the claim that online reading requires “even greater amounts of higher level thinking than offline reading” (Leu et al., 2013, p. 224). High-level thinking happens during reading in different scales, depending on the reader, on the purpose of the reading task, among other aspects. However, the argument that the Internet is “a context in which anyone may publish anything” is a strong one and we cannot deny that critical evaluation of the material is especially important in this case. I would rephrase it, though, by saying that online reading does not require higher level thinking in general in comparison to offline reading, but that it requires a special attention to the evaluation of the credibility of the source, reliability of the author, as well as the accuracy of the information.

Considering the amount of information available as well as the facility of access to this information, it might be the case that online readers needs to deal more often with information from multiple sources, that might be conflicting, complementary, compatible or even exactly the same. This will also require the use of high-level reading and thinking skills.

At our research at FALE/UFMG, we have been using think-aloud protocols to understand the process, followed by comprehension questions to measure understanding of the information, and interviews to verify aspects related to the process and to the ‘product’ (comprehension). Although it is useful and efficient as a research methodology, it involves a lot of work and is time consuming. This would not work in a large-scale assessment.

I like the idea of treating online reading assessment as part of the school routine, as proposed by Coiro & Castek (2010).

As online literacy practices become more prominent in schools, it is critical that educators move beyond thinking about digital assessment as isolated tests and view these more as authentic opportunities for students to practice and apply the skills, knowledge, and dispositions they will need as readers and writers in a digital age. (p. 316)

According to Coiro & Castek (2010) classroom language arts assessment situations should incorporate

a) Authentic (real world) multidisciplinary problems to solve. Those problems would encourage collaborative work, inquiry-based investigation and considering diverse perspectives.

b) Digital communication tools, allowing the students to develop skills to communicate both in non-standard writing forms as well as in standard writing (eg.: texting and academic writing), using the adequate language for each different purpose, audience and context.

c) Digital scaffolds to help students deal with their particular needs. "Multimedia enhancements such as text-to-speech reading aids, annotation tools, scaffolds for summarizing, synthesizing, and reflection” (p. 317), are suggested as a way to reduce the chance that decoding and language differences impair learning.

This view of online assessment would be difficult to hold in a large-scale assessment, but, in my opinion, it is the example schools should follow.

References

Coiro, J. & Castek, J. (2010). Assessment frameworks for teaching and learning English language arts in a digital age. In D. Lapp & D. Fisher (Eds.), The Handbook of Research on Teaching The English Language Arts, Third Edition (pp. 314-321).International Reading Association and The National Council of Teachers of English.New York, NY: Routledge.

Leu, D.J., Forzani, E., Burlingame, C., Kulikowich, J. Sedransk, N., Coiro, J., & Kennedy, C. (2013). The new literacies of online research and comprehension: Assessing and preparing students for the 21st century with common core state standards. In Neuman, S. B. & Gambrell, L.B. (Eds.), Massey, C. (Assoc. Ed.). Reading instruction in the age of common core standards, (pp. 219-236). Newark, DE: International Reading Association.