title: Where's the difficulty in standardized reading tests: the passage or the question?
abstract: The purpose of this investigation was to examine the extent to which item and text characteristics predict item difficulty on the comprehension portion of the Gates-MacGinitie Reading Tests for the 7th-9th and 10th-12th grade levels. Detailed item-based analyses were performed on 192 comprehension questions on the basis of the cognitive processing model framework proposed by Embretson and colleagues (Embretson & Wetzel, 1987). Item difficulty was analyzed in terms of various passage features (e.g., word frequency and number of propositions) and individual-question characteristics (e.g., abstractness and degree of inferential processing), using hierarchical linear modeling. The results indicated that the difficulty of the items in the test for the 7th-9th grade level is primarily influenced by text features--in particular, vocabulary difficulty--whereas the difficulty of the items in the test for the 10th-12th grade level is less systematically influenced by text features.
authors.affiliation: University of Memphis, Memphis, Tennessee, USA. yasozuru@uic.edu
authors.forename: Yasuhiro
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Ozuru
authors.forename: Michael
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Rowe
authors.forename: Tenaha
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: O'Reilly
authors.forename: Danielle S
authors.initials: DS
authors.lastname: McNamara
mesh_terms: D004521:Educational Measurement; D006801:Humans; D011932:Reading