The CAAP Reading Test measures students comprehension as a product of referring, reasoning, and generalizing. The test consists of four prose passages of about 900 words each that are representative of the level and kinds of writing encountered in college curriculum. As reading is not a specific goal of Eastern New Mexico University s general education curriculum, it is not possible to link reading test results to specific coursework. Also, score results can be examined for transfers versus natives, by motivation, by gender, and by ethnicity. Of the 890 students who have taken the CAAP, from the fall of 1983 through the spring of 1995, the average is 62.2.
Eastern students compare favorably to the national norm.
Table 1 reports the ACT score of 321 Eastern students by decile in comparison to their CAAP reading scale results. ACT encourages caution in generalizing results from the decile comparison to all students. However, for the students whose incoming ACT scores and CAAP scores are available, there is clear evidence that a sizable number of students demonstrate overall improvement in reading abilities. Cell entries are actual n-counts for Eastern New Mexico University. For this group, the average score was 63.2, clearly above the national norm.