CLOZE MEASURES AS INDICES OF ACHIEVEMENT COMPREHENSION WHEN LEARNING FROM EXTENDED PROSE

The hypothesis that cloze measures are a function of content achievement among adult learners and, consequently, should be sensitive to instructional treatments was tested in two experimental studies. College juniors and seniors took tests immediately before (pre), immediately after (post) and four weeks after (delay) studying a prose passage. The types of tests administered in each session were: (1) a 20-item multiple-choice test, (2) a reproduction passage cloze test, (3) a recognition passage cloze test, (4) a reproduction summary cloze test, and (5) a recognition summary cloze test. All tests show significant differences between pre- and postconditions, and between recognition and reproduction modes. The reproduction summary cloze test was found to be the most sensitive to the instructional treatment, as indicated by an w2 statistic on pre-post measures. The summary cloze tests were resistant to forgetting while the cloze passage and multiple-choice tests show significant decreases in performance over the four week delay interval. The initial research on cloze measures is credited to W. L. Taylor (1953) when he reported the new method of obtaining so-called readability scores. A cloze test is constructed by removing every nth word from a passage of prose and by inserting a blank in its place. A commonly used cloze measure is the number of correct words that a subject provides for the blanks. Extensive research on cloze testing parameters (Rankin, 1965; Bormuth, 1967; Potter, 1968) indicates (1) that cloze scores are closely related to reading comprehension test scores, (2) that the "best" cloze procedure is obtained when every fifth word is removed from a passage, (3) that up to five parallel forms can be easily obtained from the same passage by using different words for the first blank word, and (4) that alternative methods of scoring responses do not appreciably change any of the test statistics except the mean number correct. It seems reasonable to expect that success in completing a section of cloze prose is primarily a function of (1) an understanding of how the language goes together (syntactic skills) and (2) an understanding of what the author is trying to say (achievement in the subject matter area). As students attain a firm grasp of syntactic relationships (probably by age 12), the first variable becomes relatively constant and one is left with the proposition that cloze measures are primarily a function of achievement. If this proposition is true, cloze measures should be sensitive to instructional treatments and they should respond in a pattern similar to other "accepted" indices of achievement. At least two studies have investigated the effects of instruction on cloze scores. Taylor (1957) administered a set of cloze, multiple-choice achievement and ability tests to Air Force trainees in a pre- and postinstruction design. The results showed that studying the passage significantly improved cloze and multiple-choice scores. In a similar study, Rankin et al. (1969) report a significant gain on cloze due to instruction. Both studies attempted to control for possible effects of taking a pretest.