Sentence Verification Technique Research Articles

The Usage of Meaning Identification Technique in Measuring Reading Comprehension Skills

In this study, it is aimed to determine at what level the Meaning Identification Technique (MIT) can measure the reading comprehension skills of the 4th grade primary school students and to test the validity and reliability of the MIT test with different types of texts. In the study carried out in survey model, MIT and Sentence Verification Technique (SVT) tests, which were developed by the researcher and are peculiar to narrative and informative texts, were used. The readability of the texts were tested with Cloze Tests (CT) developed specifically for each type of text. The study was carried out with the participation of 87 primary school 4th grade students in two primary schools randomly selected among the public schools in the city of Ankara. The results of the study demonstrated that MIT tests measure reading comprehension skills as reliable as SVT tests. While there was a significant difference between comprehension and the numbers of reading in narrative texts, it was found that there was no significant difference with the numbers of reading in informative texts. A great majority of students (approximately 75%) felt the need to read two or more times while making sense of the text. On the other hand, MIT tests are a significant predictor of Turkish course achievements.

Investigating the Reliability of the Sentence Verification Technique

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.

ComprehENotes, an Instrument to Assess Patient Reading Comprehension of Electronic Health Record Notes: Development and Validation.

BackgroundPatient portals are widely adopted in the United States and allow millions of patients access to their electronic health records (EHRs), including their EHR clinical notes. A patient’s ability to understand the information in the EHR is dependent on their overall health literacy. Although many tests of health literacy exist, none specifically focuses on EHR note comprehension.ObjectiveThe aim of this paper was to develop an instrument to assess patients’ EHR note comprehension.MethodsWe identified 6 common diseases or conditions (heart failure, diabetes, cancer, hypertension, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and liver failure) and selected 5 representative EHR notes for each disease or condition. One note that did not contain natural language text was removed. Questions were generated from these notes using Sentence Verification Technique and were analyzed using item response theory (IRT) to identify a set of questions that represent a good test of ability for EHR note comprehension.ResultsUsing Sentence Verification Technique, 154 questions were generated from the 29 EHR notes initially obtained. Of these, 83 were manually selected for inclusion in the Amazon Mechanical Turk crowdsourcing tasks and 55 were ultimately retained following IRT analysis. A follow-up validation with a second Amazon Mechanical Turk task and IRT analysis confirmed that the 55 questions test a latent ability dimension for EHR note comprehension. A short test of 14 items was created along with the 55-item test.ConclusionsWe developed ComprehENotes, an instrument for assessing EHR note comprehension from existing EHR notes, gathered responses using crowdsourcing, and used IRT to analyze those responses, thus resulting in a set of questions to measure EHR note comprehension. Crowdsourced responses from Amazon Mechanical Turk can be used to estimate item parameters and select a subset of items for inclusion in the test set using IRT. The final set of questions is the first test of EHR note comprehension.

Replicating Criterion Validity in Science Content for the Combination of Critical Content Monitoring and Sentence Verification Technique

The purpose of the research was to replicate commonality analysis for two measures: critical content monitoring and sentence verification technique. Participants were 967 fourth-, fifth-, and sixth-grade students across seven public primary schools in a southeastern U.S. district. The predictor variables were administered as benchmarks 3 times in an academic year. Predictor scores were compared with science content test and reading comprehension scores from the Stanford Achievement Test–Tenth Edition abbreviated online form and a statewide accountability test. Commonality analysis results indicated that scores from both critical content monitoring and sentence verification technique added unique variance to explanatory models, replicating previous findings. In most cases, critical content monitoring scores provided the greatest percentage of unique and common variance to model explanations.

A Comparison of Two Content Area Curriculum-Based Measurement Tools

In the present study, two types of curriculum-based measurement (CBM) tools in science, Vocabulary Matching (VM) and Statement Verification for Science (SV-S), a modified Sentence Verification Technique, were compared. Specifically, this study aimed to determine whether the format of information presented (i.e., SV-S vs. VM) produces differences in alternate form reliability and validity of scores or any differences in accuracy of prediction of scores on the state standardized science assessment. Overall, 25 eighth-grade science students were administered two SV-S and two VM forms with identical items along with spring eighth-grade maze passages from Aimsweb. Students had recently taken the eighth-grade state science test. Results regarding technical adequacy for each CBM tool were consistent with past findings. However, this study extends the literature base on CBM tools in science by providing evidence for using standards to develop VM forms. In addition, despite probable ceiling effects, additional evidence was found for the potential of SV-S as a CBM tool in science.

Teaching Word Meanings to Students at Different Reading Ability: A Controlled Assessment of the Contextual-Based Vocabulary Instruction on Reading Comprehension

The purpose of this study was to examine the effectiveness of contextual-based vocabulary instruction on reading comprehension of seventh-grade students at different reading ability levels in social studies. The Sentence Verification Technique test consisted of 16-items was used to determine participants’ reading comprehension skills. In addition, a semi-structured interview form was used to describe participants’ perceptions and experiences related to the vocabulary intervention program activities. The experimental condition received a contextual-based vocabulary instruction intervention program for eight weeks in 10 sessions; in contrast to the control condition participated in a wide reading program. As a result, this study yielded two findings: First, the results indicated that teaching students how to use contextual analysis to infer word meanings from context improved significantly their own reading comprehension scores. Second, the qualitative findings showed that poor readers could be able unlock the complexity of the meanings of unknown words and use the cognitive strategies that required to overcome their reading difficulties while reading through explicit instruction. The results suggested that it seemed as though the context-based vocabulary instruction used in this study to improve reading comprehension scores was a fairly powerful procedure for all students, both poor readers and average–high readers in the experimental condition.

NOTETAKING SKILLS INSTRUCTION FOR DEVELOPMENT OF MIDDLE SCHOOL STUDENTS’ NOTETAKING PERFORMANCE

The objective of this study was to investigate the effects of explicit instruction in notetaking skills on the notetaking performance of seventh‐grade students at different reading ability levels. The students in the notetaking instruction condition (NTI) received classroom‐based notetaking skills instruction (approximately 40 minutes) every week for 10 weeks. The comparison condition students (CNT) were asked to use conventional notetaking (CNT) that was embedded within the daily social studies lessons. The participants’ reading comprehension abilities were identified through the Sentence Verification Technique, which consisted of a 16‐item expository text. A notetaking performance test (NTPT) was used to assess the effect of notetaking skills instruction on two dimensions of the participants’ notes (verbatim copying and terse value). The results demonstrated that the terse value of students’ notes in the NTI condition was significantly better than that of the students in the CNT condition. The students in the NTI condition reduced their percentage of verbatim copying and used fewer words to cover more main concepts in the NTPT that followed the instructional intervention. Surprisingly, the students at low reading ability showed the greatest gains in notetaking performance from verbatim copying to terse notetaking.

Validity of two general outcome measures of science and social studies achievement

The present research expanded validity findings for a structured formative assessment measure of content learning that was administered online and known as critical content monitoring. The study also evaluated the potential for additional measures, including sentence verification technique and written retell, to explain variance in student achievement in science and social studies classrooms. Participants were fifth-grade students (N=51) enrolled in a public primary school in the southeastern U.S. Three predictor variables (i.e. critical content monitoring, sentence verification technique and written retell) were correlated with content test scores from the nationally representative standardized achievement test (i.e. Stanford Achievement Test-Tenth Edition abbreviated online form) and a statewide accountability test. Pearson correlations for critical content monitoring and the Stanford tests across science (r=.55) and social studies (r=.63) were moderately strong and similar in magnitude with other reported correlations for academic language measures in the literature. Correlations for critical content monitoring were descriptively larger than those between the standardized tests and sentence verification technique and written retell. Commonality analyses indicated that both critical content monitoring and sentence verification technique added unique variance to explanatory models. Limitations and implications were discussed.

Psychometric validation of the Sentence Verification Technique to assess L2 reading comprehension ability

English teachers use the Sentence Verification Technique (Royer et al., 1979) to determine the readability of written material for their classes. This process requires students to read short passages from a book, followed by isolated sentences. These sentences can be either identical or different from the original passages, in their meaning as well as in their form. For each sentence, students must indicate whether or not its content corresponds to that of the original passage. This paper reports on the design and assessment of an SVT test created for measuring reading comprehension ability, based on four English texts. The instrument was administered to 171 adult English learners, of various levels of English proficiency. The data were analyzed using both traditional psychometric methods and the Rasch model. Results indicate that the test shows high internal consistency, that it respects the basic assumptions behind the Rasch model, and that it is in the recommended range of difficulty for that technique.

Traditional and alternative methods of measuring the understandability of accounting narratives

Purpose– The study aims to explore the use of alternative measures of “understandability” on accounting texts. This includes the meaning identification test (MIT) and the sentence verification technique (SVT), which have not previously been used by accounting researchers, as well as variants on the traditional Cloze tests such as the C-Test.Design/methodology/approach– This study focuses on the understandability of accounting texts and evaluates how reliable the Cloze test is as a measure of comprehension. An experiment was designed and conducted to measure users' performance with a variety of comprehension measures (MIT, SVT, Cloze, C-Test).Findings– The study concludes that the outcomes from the MIT and SVT comprehension tests are not significantly associated with those from the Cloze tests. This implies that while the Cloze test is a good measure of the predictability of accounting narratives, and of textual redundancy, it does not necessarily measure the understandability of the text.Originality/value– These measures of understandability, which have not previously been used in accounting, would enable researchers to test the communicational effectiveness of using different accounting narratives such as annual reports or prospectuses. Such a measure could be used to improve the understandability of accounting narratives. The strengths and weaknesses of the various tests are assessed. It is suggested that there is a need for further experimentation especially with the MIT test.

Running Head: Reading Comprehension: Reviving the Sentence Verification Technique

Reading success is largely determined by readingcomprehension. Thus accurate assessment of readingcomprehension is necessary to identify those who requireremediation and to plan future instructions in classrooms.Sentence verification technique (SVT) is one of themethods of assessing comprehension and can function asa diagnostic tool in reading assessment. The aim of thecurrent study was to determine whether the SVT coulddetect gender and grade differences in readingcomprehension. The study targeted 1091 elementarygrade students comprising both boys and girls who wereassessed using the SVT. The students read two textpassages selected according to their grade level andresponded to four sentence types - original, paraphrase,meaning change and distracter sentences. Independentsample t test highlighted that girls were significantlybetter than boys with regard to reading comprehensionability. One way analysis of variance to analyse gradedifferences indicated that there were significantimprovements in reading comprehension ability withhigher grades, thus highlighting the sensitivity of SVTs indetecting developmental changes in readingcomprehension. The findings of this study emphasize thediagnostic potential of the SVTs with regard toidentifying children with reading comprehensio.

Health literacy and cancer prevention: Two new instruments to assess comprehension

ObjectivesAbility to understand spoken health information is an important facet of health literacy, but to date, no instrument has been available to quantify patients’ ability in this area. We sought to develop a test to assess comprehension of spoken health messages related to cancer prevention and screening to fill this gap, and a complementary test of comprehension of written health messages. MethodsWe used the Sentence Verification Technique to write items based on realistic health messages about cancer prevention and screening, including media messages, clinical encounters and clinical print materials. Items were reviewed, revised, and pre-tested. Adults aged 40–70 participated in a pilot administration in Georgia, Hawaii, and Massachusetts. ResultsThe Cancer Message Literacy Test-Listening is self-administered via touchscreen laptop computer. No reading is required. It takes approximately 1 hour. The Cancer Message Literacy Test-Reading is self-administered on paper. It takes approximately 10min. ConclusionsThese two new tests will allow researchers to assess comprehension of spoken health messages, to examine the relationship between listening and reading literacy, and to explore the impact of each form of literacy on health-related outcomes. Practice implicationsResearchers and clinicians now have a means of measuring comprehension of spoken health information.

聴覚障害児における作動記憶と文章理解 : 文章検証課題の使用

聴覚障害児における作動記憶と文章理解 : 文章検証課題の使用

Rethinking Reading Comprehension Instruction: A Comparison of Instruction for Strategies and Content Approaches

A BSTRA C T Reports from research and the larger educational community demonstrate that too many students have limited ability to comprehend texts. The research reported here involved a two-year study in which standardized comprehension instruction for representations of two major approaches was designed and implemented. The effectiveness of the two experimental comprehension instructional approaches (content and strategies) and a control approach were compared. Content instruction focused student attention on the content of the text through open, meaning-based questions about the text. In strategies instruction, students were taught specific procedures to guide their access to text during reading of the text. Lessons for the control approach were developed using questions available in the teacher’s edition of the basal reading program used in the participating classrooms. Student participants were all fifth graders in a low-performing urban district. In addition to assessments of comprehension of lesson texts and an analysis of lesson discourse, three assessments were developed to compare student ability to transfer knowledge gained. The results were consistent from Year 1 to Year 2. No differences were seen on one measure of lesson-text comprehension, the sentence verification technique. However, for narrative recall and expository learning probes, content students outperformed strategies students, and occasionally, the basal control students outperformed strategies students. For one of the transfer assessments, there was a modest effect in favor of the content students. Transcripts of the lessons were examined, and differences in amount of talk about the text and length of student response also favored the content approach.

Incremental and predictive utility of formative assessment methods of reading comprehension

Formative assessment measures are commonly used in schools to assess reading and to design instruction accordingly. The purpose of this research was to investigate the incremental and concurrent validity of formative assessment measures of reading comprehension. It was hypothesized that formative measures of reading comprehension would contribute more to our understanding of students' overall reading abilities than simply oral reading fluency (ORF). It was also hypothesized that measures could be modeled in a meaningful way to explain student performance on criterion measures of academic competence. Four formative measures of reading comprehension – maze (MZ), retell fluency (RTF), written retell (WRT), and sentence verification technique (SVT) – were used to measure unique aspects of reading comprehension through production-type responses. Results suggested that reading comprehension measures, when combined with ORF, added to the total variance associated with reading ability and were reliable indicators of student performance on a high stakes criterion-referenced assessment of grade-level literacy.

An Interview with James M. Royer About Reading and Comprehension

James M. Royer is a professor of psychology at the University of Massachusetts. His research has focused on the development, vali dation, and application of the Sentence Verification Technique (SVT) which measures reading and listening comprehension. Dr. Royer also investigates math learning difficulties and has developed a Computer based Academic Assessment System (CAAS) which is available at www.educationalhelp.com. Professor Royer's work is internationally rec ognized and applied. He has worked on projects in Grenada, Guatemala, Belize, Haiti, Burkina Faso, India and Nigeria. There, he assists educa tors with the development of educational tests. In this interview, he dis cusses his research and the domain of reading comprehension and its measurement.

Listening Comprehension in Primary Level Grades Two, Four and Six

Aspects of listening comprehension skills in second-, fourth- and sixth-grade students (n=107) were investigated. The design employed the Sentence Verification Technique (SVT). Participants listened to three narrative and three expository passages, which had been recorded onto a CD, together with test sentences. Compared to the narrative passages, the expository material was more difficult to understand. Girls systematically scored higher than boys on all measures of listening comprehension although this sex difference was small and mostly nonsignificant. These results are comparable with previous findings in reading comprehension research. Age-related improvement in listening comprehension was observed with the narrative, but not with the expository passages. Cluster analysis produced four different comprehension strategies: Good Listening, Poor Listening, and two poor strategies previously hypothesised by Royer et al . (1987), viz. Top-down and Verbatim Strategies. The results are discussed from the point of view of their possible practical significance.

Probing sensory and associative semantics for animals and objects in normal subjects.

Neuropsychological studies of patients with "category-specific" semantic memory disorders have fuelled a debate concerning the organisation of knowledge. In particular it has been suggested that the reported double dissociation between knowledge of animals and living things on the one hand, and objects on the other, reflects a more fundamental division of semantic representation into functional-associative and sensory-visual domains. The present study attempted to investigate whether there were systematic differences along these dimensions in normal subjects using a sentence-verification technique. It was found that response times were significantly longer for verification of statements concerning the sensory attributes of objects than for statements about their associative attributes. In the case of animals, there were no differences in response latency to associative or sensory statements. In the light of this previously unreported fractionation within verbal semantics, the possible consequences for models of semantic memory are discussed.

The Relationship between Listening Performance on the Sentence Verification Technique and Other Measures of Listening Comprehension

Thirty-six seventh grade students with normal nonverbal IQ, word recognition, and sentence comprehension skills completed several listening comprehension tasks. Comparison of students′ performance on three tasks was made to begin the process of establishing construct validity for the Sentence Verification Technique as a measure of listening comprehension. The tasks were the Sentence Verification Technique (SVT), to which subjects listened and verified the content of four expository passages; the Premise/Inference Stories, to which subjects listened and answered factual and interpretive questions about four stories, and the Test of Adolescent Language, ( TOAL-2), Listening Grammar Subtest, to which subjects selcted two sentences equivalent in meaning from sets of three sentences. Moderate correlations were shown for the SVT and the TOAL-2 as well as for the SVT and Premise/Inference Stories. Individual sentence types on the SVT, Originals and Meaning Changes, correlated with the TOAL-2, while Originals correlated with premise and inference questions on the Premise/Inference Stories. Based on this initial evidence regarding its construct validity, the SVT has potential as a diagnostic tool for assessing discourse level listening comprehension.

Assessing the Language Acquisition Progress of Limited English Proficient Students: Problems and New Alternative

The article discusses the need educators have for measures of linguistic competence for limited-English-proficient (LEP) students. Traditional measurement procedures do not meet these needs because of mismatches between educational experiences and test content, cultural experiences and test con- tent, and linguistic experience and test content. A new type of test -Sentence Verification Technique (SVT) test - that may meet some of the measurement needs of LEP students is described, and the results of a study that examines the reliability and validity of the new tests as measures of the listening and reading comprehension performance in both the native language and English are reported. The results indicate that the tests are reliable and that SVT performance varies as functions of placement in a transitional bilingual education program, teacher judgments of competence, and difficulty of the material. These results are consistent with the interpretation that SVT tests are valid measures of the linguistic competence of LEP students. The article concludes with a discussion of some of the advantages of using SVT tests with LEP populations.