This technical report describes the conceptual foundation and measurement properties of the Reading Inventory and Scholastic Evaluation (RISE). The RISE is a 6-subtest, Web-administered reading skills components battery. The theoretical and empirical foundations of each subtest in the battery are reviewed, as well as item designs. The results…

Background: Sentence construction and syntactic organization are known to be poor in children with specific language impairments (SLI), but little is known about the way in which children with SLI approach language tasks, and static standardized tests contribute little to the differentiation of skills within the population of children with…

This study attempts to develop a satisfactory child version of the linguistic task of judging grammaticality. With a nondifferentially reinforced forced-choice procedure, it was found that responses of 48 children (aged 5 and 7) varied as a function of the grammatical complexity of stimulus sentences. (Author/GO)

Explains that a good essay question should be as specific in what it asks for as the students are expected to be in their answers. (HOD)

Evaluated the use of the T-unit in the scoring of spoken and written work by children learning a second language. (RK)

Describes two research programs on the syntactic abilities of hearing impaired and normal hearing individuals. The first program involved deaf students acquiring English structure; the second involved the construction of the Test of Syntactic Abilities and its application to deaf, hard of hearing, and normal hearing students in the United States,…

Described is the development of the Test of Syntactical Abilities (TSA), an instrument for measuring deaf children's ability to comprehend and produce syntactically correct written sentences. (Author/IM)

To assess a child's communicative ability, it is important to develop not only measures of his understanding of vocabulary, but of his understanding of the syntax of language: patterns of words, regularities, and relationships of words in a sentence. Controlled test situations should be established in which the child receives minimal cues from the…

A study of eight adult chronic aphasic patients' comprehension of sentences and pictures in which comparisons of time and space were crucial was designed to assess A. R. Luria's approach to designing comprehension test tasks. The investigation required patients, with lesions of varying size and location, to determine whether a sentence expressing…

In order to assess the relationship between knowledge of language structure and reading comprehension, the English Language Structure Test was constructed. In this test, students had to reconstruct scrambled sentences of controlled complexity. The English Language Structure Test and the Stanford Reading Test were administered to 202 junior high…

Revised version of a paper presented at Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana, November 1972. (DD)

A type of item used frequently in standardized testing involves the recognition of a sentence. Examples of such items are the sentence completion items, used in both the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) and the Graduate Record Examination (GRE), and the sentence correction items used in the Test of Standard Written English. Tests that contain such…

The acquisition of the passive sentence structure by 36 adult learners of English as a second language (ESL) was studied. Twelve learners each spoke Arabic, Japanese, and Spanish as their native language. For each language group, four were beginners, four intermediates, and four advanced learners of English. All were studying English at the…

Three rating scales--with all positive or all negative wording, or a mixture of both--were administered to 522 children in grades four through six. The results indicated that it was difficult for students to indicate agreement by disagreeing with a negative statement. This affected test validity. Author/GDC)

Investigated the acquisition of base-generated topics in Mandarin Chinese by British students learning Chinese. The hypothesis is not confirmed that it would not be difficult for English speakers to acquire the base-generated topic in Chinese because in the acquisition of Chinese, English-speaking learners are exposed to positive evidence of…