Measuring college students' reading comprehension ability using cloze tests

Recent investigations challenge the construct validity of sustained silent reading tests. Performance of two groups of post-secondary students (e.g. struggling and non-struggling) on a sustained silent reading test and two types of cloze test (i.e. maze and open-ended) was compared in order to identify the test format that contributes greater variance in reading comprehension. One hundred participants were recruited from students enrolled in a preparatory course for a high-stakes statewide reading examination. Our results suggest that all three measures have good concurrent validity. There was no evidence that open-ended cloze performance was more related to verbal ability than any other reading measure. Maze performance did the best job at discriminating between our struggling and non-struggling readers. Implications for reading comprehension assessment in post secondary-aged adults are discussed.