Assess the difficulty of a reading comprehension test

Experimentation of a tool on a teaching practice

Abstract

This article explores the problem of assessing reading comprehension in the school language, focusing in particular on regulating the difficulty of assessment instruments. To do so, we focus on a summative assessment practice of reading comprehension implemented by a 9 th Grade teacher (pupils aged 12-13) in her class at three different levels. We analyze the difficulty of the text used and of the three questionnaires – declared by the teacher as being of different difficulty – in order to understand how she adapts the questions according to the grade level of her students. We then compare these dimensions with those retained in a tool for evaluating the difficulty of texts and questions in reading comprehension, developed by Sánchez Abchi et al. (2016). The analyses show that the dimensions that the teacher varies to adjust the test difficulty coincide to a large extent with the dimensions in the tool for estimating difficulty. However, other factors, related to the pupils’ habits and teaching practices, also play a major role in assessing reading comprehension and in estimating task difficulty.