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I am going to express four ideas. This first is that if we are going to assess, we must be very clear about what reading is.
Reading is swimming within the text. Just that? No, reading is also diving underneath the text. Assessment must bear those two aspects in mind.
The second idea: a problem for assessment. Why has this lad got this mark? Did he get tired? Doesn’t he want to do it anymore, did he get bored?
Has he stopped making an effort to read, and has got a certain mark for it? Why?
I want to make it clear that talking about reading comprehension in terms of assessment must bear in mind these two dimensions.
I am going to give you a better example with a comparison of the definition of PISA 2000 with that of 2009.
It is exactly the same, but with an added variant. On the right I have underlines the words “take an interest in”,
which makes it a more global definition, going beyond the limits of basic reading skills.
My next idea: I think that assessment can do a lot of good, or it can do a lot of harm.
In the knowledge society we demand strong levels of comprehension, knowing how to swim and who to dive.
PISA 2009 includes electronic reading (ERA). Just a couple of points: in Denmark, the Government has taken the brave decision
of allowing students full access to the internet during their final school exams.
If you ask a teacher at secondary school where this measure has been introduced, they are always asked: "But aren’t you afraid they’ll cheat?"
And they reply:"We are no longer at that stage. Now what we do is present them with four tasks which require them to go on the internet and resolve them. There isn’t an issue with cheating".