A Description of the Developmental Procedures for New York State's Computerized Bank of Reading Objectives

Abstract

This article presents the rationale, structure, content, and procedure for the computerized bank of reading objectives being developed for New York State schools. The project was initiated to improve upon previous banking efforts, and to provide a technical resource which would contribute toward primarily localized planning, design, and evaluation of reading programs. A definition of the organizing concepts for the project, including a new generalized format for writing objectives (the generic objective); a procedure for organizing the generic form of objectives into a summative form called the criterion objective; and a structure for scaling or leveling the content in reading and associating it with objectives is contained within this article. It further describes a computerized processing technique called SCAN (System for Coding and Analysis), invented to eliminate redundancy in a developing bank of objectives. A computer program developed for the project supports a set of generalized edit and change functions among the objectives in the bank; it also enables the operation of SCAN, and provides for the accession and structuring of local banks of reading objectives for such users as teachers and reading specialists. The implications of the banking development are discussed in terms of the support lent to basic and applied research topics in reading. One focus of the discussion, for example, is the support generated by the bank contents and structure for the generation of reading test items via the use of algorithms.