The procedures for the construction of the Dutch national exams of reading comprehension and for setting cut-off scores have remained roughly unchanged over 20 years. Construction procedures are characterized by thorough screening rather than pretesting; cut-off scores are influenced by procedures and percentages fails rather than by equating. Two…

The research project reported in this paper had two aims: to demonstrate what standard multiple-choice questions and two new varieties (multiple-choice cloze and guided summary test and to assess whether the new formats test the same skills. To find out what the various question formats test, the study looked at a battery of tests, each of which…

Investigates how many words of the Dutch language, and which words, an adult nonnative speaker must know receptively in order to understand first-year university reading materials. Assessment of the representativeness of a list of 23,550 words and administration of a 140-item multiple-choice vocabulary test indicated that a minimum of 10,000 base…

The development and validation of a test of listening comprehension for English as a second language at the Dutch National Institute for Educational Measurement (Cito) is described. The test uses two distinct item formats: true-false items and modified cloze items with two options. Both item formats were found to measure foreign language listening…