Cloze Tests May be Quick, But Are They Dirty? Development and Preliminary Validation of a Cloze Test of Reading Comprehension

A commonly held view is that cloze tests may well provide a quick measure of something reading related, but that they are not suitable for assessments of understanding of ideas beyond the sentence boundary. The present article presents challenges to this view. It is argued that word gaps can be carefully selected so that filling them in requires proper understanding of the ideas of the text. The reliability and validity of such a comprehension-focused cloze test was demonstrated in a study of 204 Danish adults attending reading courses or general education. The quick (10 min) cloze comprehension test correlated strongly (r = .84) with a standard (30 min) question-answering comprehension test. Only a small part of this correlation was accounted for by decoding ability or vocabulary. The cloze test was somewhat more sensitive to decoding ability than the question-answering comprehension test was, and it provided a better fit to the participants' self-reported reading difficulties.