Investigating the Reliability of the Sentence Verification Technique

Abstract

Reading comprehension plays an important role in achievement for all academic domains. The purpose of this study is to describe the sentence verification technique (SVT) (Royer, Hastings, & Hook, 1979) as an alternative method of assessing reading comprehension, which can be used with a variety of texts and across diverse populations and educational contexts. Additionally, this study adds a unique contribution to the extant literature on the SVT through an investigation of the precision of the instrument across proficiency levels. Data were gathered from a sample of 464 fourth-grade students from the Northeast region of the United States. Reliability was estimated using one, two, three, and four passage test forms. Two or three passages provided sufficient reliability. The conditional reliability analyses revealed that the SVT test scores were reliable for readers with average to below average proficiency, but did not provide reliable information for students who were very poor or strong readers.

Keywords:

• reading comprehension
• classroom assessment
• reliability

Notes

1 To administer the Maze, students are given a passage to read in which every n^th word is deleted and replaced with three word choices. The students must select the best word to fit the meaning of the sentence. Students have three minutes to complete the task.

2 In the United States, Free/Reduced lunch status is a rough estimate of socioeconomic status. The National School Lunch Program is a federally assisted meal program that provides low cost or free lunches to American school children each school day. Free or reduced lunch is determined based on the family income level, with children from the poorest families eligible for free lunches and children from poor families that exceed the yearly determined poverty threshold eligible for reduced lunches.

3 The 2,145 unique correlation coefficients is essentially the lower portion of a correlation matrix with 66 variables (i.e., (66*65)/2).