Assessment of Reading Comprehension

25 a disturbed student who has encountered many unfortunate experiences at home or in the school may be unable to preserve when required for comprehending reading passages. e. Skills of comprehending Another obvious factor, which influences the depth and amount of comprehension, is the skill, which the students have developed for that purpose. Like all reading skills, the ability to comprehend what we read develops gradually from the simple to the complex skills.

8. Assessment of Reading Comprehension

Snow 1999: 52-53 states that the improvement of instruction relies crucially on the availability of information about the effectiveness of instruction. Teachers need reliable and valid assessments in order to know which students are learning as expected and which need extra help. Futher, Kameenui et al. 2006 in Paris 2007: 2 mentions four purposes of reading assessment: screening, diagnosis, progress monitoring and outcome evaluation. In addition, Carlisle and Rice 2004 in Paris 2007: 2 identified four similar purposes for assessing reading comprehension in school settings: a. State and district evaluation f programs and curricula; b. Identification of student at risk for reading problems; c. Diagnoses of students’ reading problem; and d. Measurement of students’ progress during instruction or treatment. Reading comprehension has been evaluated as an indicator of literacy skill as well as academic achievement, so it has been used to measure the effectives of teachers, curricula, instruction, and new programs. To sort students by ability and PLAGIAT MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TERPUJI 26 to monitor progress of students and schools, it is used standardized tests with scaled scores as summative measures. The test score are then used as proxy measures of the quality of instruction provided by the teachers and schools. The reading scores mid-term test, final term test and National Examination are often reported to Musyawarah Kerja Kepala Sekolah MKKS and used to map the competence of the students in kabupaten Bantul. Besides the National Examination is used by the students to get the higher school so the students have to learn English seriously. According to Paris 2007: 3, the assessments of reading comprehension usually require students to read silently and without assistance many short passages and to answer a variety of questions, multiple-choice or open ended, about implicit and explicit information in the text. The method is based on a quantitative models of normative skulls used to sort students on the basis of uniforms scores, b psychometric models with samples of text and questions in item pools that yield high reliability and validity across items and test forms, and c economically efficient models of standardized testing with group administration and computerized scoring. Aebersold and Field 2000: 175-176 lists some types of reading comprehension test as follow: 1 multiple choice tests. The tests are usually set up in such a way that the candidates are required to select the answer from a number of given options only one of which is correct; 2 short answer and open- ended questions. In this test, students are given a passage to read then, asked to answer questions by writing a few sentences or paragraph. Alternatively, students are asked to write a summary of the passage; 3 completion task. This is another 27 form of comprehension testing that demands recall and writing as well as comprehension. Teacher may supply a reading passage followed by a set of statements to be completed by the students. In the simplest version, students may use the words from original passage to complete the sentence. In more complex versions, students should interpret or analyse the text before completing the sentences.

D. E-Learning in Teaching Learning Activities