Background: Middle school students use the information conveyed by morphemes (i.e., units of meaning such as prefixes, root words and suffixes) in different ways to support their literacy endeavours, suggesting the likelihood that morphological knowledge is multidimensional. This has important implications for assessment. Methods: The current…

This paper reviews the concept of high-stakes assessment against a background of postmodernism, and argues that the inaccessibility of cognitive processes is only one part of the problem of reading assessment: even greater challenges are posed by a postmodern analysis, in which an incredulity toward metanarratives leads to a series of six…