Engaging Text: Assessing paraphrase and understanding

This article reports on an innovative exercise designed to assess students' paraphrase of a given text, the ability to paraphrase being an important component part of understanding. Students were given a source text consisting of a short passage from an introductory psychology textbook. A checklist was drawn up enumerating the points of information in the source text, and the paraphrases were then marked in terms of how many points of information and structure were reproduced. Analysis of the marks showed three things: that the task was more than trivial, and involved more than a single simple 'skill'; that information central to the theme of the passage was reproduced more reliably than peripheral information, with some significant aberrations; and that points of information clustered together into 'kinds'. The discussion explores this notion of kinds of information, and notes its relevance for student feedback.