Gli anni di Eco. Riflessioni sull'uso di prove strutturate con risposte chiuse e aperte a margine di una ricerca sulla comprensione della lettura

This study stems from a broader work aiming to validate a reading comprehension test for final year high school students; the work stands as a stimulus for reflection on the use of structured tests to assess reading comprehension skills and, in particular, analyses the relationship between the different areas of assessment of reading comprehension processes and question types (in open-ended versus multiple choice items). By analysing an open-ended question, we discuss the possibility of assessing the mental processes involved in reading and their relations with students’ encyclopaedic knowledge. A great many studies have demonstrated how prior knowledge is one of the main variables explaining reading skills (20-70% of variance in a test of reading comprehension) and that excluding it can distort measures of reading literacy. It appears that in addition to the methodological rigor needed to construct valid and reliable tests, there is need for an approach to more fully understand and to more deeply consider all the solutions that strategic and skilled readers implement and put in place in order to completely comprehend a text.