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New Group Reading Test Sentence completion and passage comprehension in a single test The process of developing the New Group Reading Test (NGRT) began by asking teachers for their views on GRT2 and the changes they would like. GRT2 was well established and valued and it was possible to test sentence and continuous prose reading but only by testing twice, which a large number of teachers did. It seemed sensible to combine these aspects of reading in a single test which would allow a direct comparison to be made for every pupil. This would offer increased diagnostic value from the test, which many teachers wanted, while retaining straightforward administration and scoring. The New Group Reading Test provides an age standardised score from the test as a whole which gives the most accurate and reliable indication of a pupil’s reading ability. However, it is possible to look at sub‐scale scores for each section of the test in order to determine if pupils have particular areas of strength or areas for further development in their reading skills. The scores for the sub‐scales are presented using stanines rather than age‐standardised scores. Stanines minimise the over‐interpretation of small, insignificant differences among test scores. As a rough guide, if the sub‐scale stanines are the same or differ by one, this indicates similar performance on the two sub‐scales. If the stanine score differs by two or more, it may be an indication of significantly different performance on the two sections of the test. (However, with very low or very high raw scores, even small changes in the raw score have a large impact on the stanine score. For example in a sentence completion section with 20 items two pupils of the same age scoring 18 out of 20 and 20 out of 20 respectively could have stanine scores of 7 and 9 respectively. The notion of regression to the mean applies here: if a pupil obtains a very high (or very low) score in one section, they are likely, simply by chance, to gain a lower (or a higher) score in the other section. This is reflected in asymmetric confidence intervals.) Therefore it is important to recognise that any significant differences in the two subscale scores may only be indicative of a difference in performance and would benefit from further investigation. For example the Suffolk Reading Scale (SRS) could be used to confirm pupils reading ability at sentence level and the York Assessment of Reading Comprehension (YARC) could be used to confirm their ability in reading comprehension. Sentence completion The sentence completion section of the NGRT assesses pupils’ reading skills at sentence level. These skills are slightly different to those used when reading a whole text and answering retrieval and inferential questions about that text. In the sentence completion items pupils have much less contextual information to use in order to determine the missing word. Therefore pupils who rely heavily on contextual cues to draw even simple inferences may score less well on this section of the NGRT. The lack of contextual cues will mean that

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New Group Reading Test 

Sentence completion and passage comprehension in a single test 

The process of developing the New Group Reading Test (NGRT) began by asking teachers for their views on GRT2 and the changes they would like.  GRT2 was well established and valued and it was possible to test sentence and continuous prose reading but only by testing twice, which a large number of teachers did.  It seemed sensible to combine these aspects of reading in a single test which would allow a direct comparison to be made for every pupil. This would offer increased diagnostic value from the test, which many teachers wanted, while retaining straightforward administration and scoring. 

The New Group Reading Test provides an age standardised score from the test as a whole which gives the most accurate and reliable indication of a pupil’s reading ability. However, it is possible to look at sub‐scale scores for each section of the test in order to determine if pupils have particular areas of strength or areas for further development in their reading skills. 

The scores for the sub‐scales are presented using stanines rather than age‐standardised scores. Stanines minimise the over‐interpretation of small, insignificant differences among test scores. As a rough guide, if the sub‐scale stanines are the same or differ by one, this indicates similar performance on the two sub‐scales. If the stanine score differs by two or more, it may be an indication of significantly different performance on the two sections of the test.  (However, with very low or very high raw scores, even small changes in the raw score have a large impact on the stanine score. For example in a sentence completion section with 20 items two pupils of the same age scoring 18 out of 20 and 20 out of 20 respectively could have stanine scores of 7 and 9 respectively. The notion of regression to the mean applies here: if a pupil obtains a very high (or very low) score in one section, they are likely, simply by chance, to gain a lower (or a higher) score in the other section. This is reflected in asymmetric confidence intervals.) 

Therefore it is important to recognise that any significant differences in the two subscale scores may only be indicative of a difference in performance and would benefit from further investigation. For example the Suffolk Reading Scale (SRS) could be used to confirm pupils reading ability at sentence level and the York Assessment of Reading Comprehension (YARC) could be used to confirm their ability in reading comprehension. 

Sentence completion 

The sentence completion section of the NGRT assesses pupils’ reading skills at sentence level. These skills are slightly different to those used when reading a whole text and answering retrieval and inferential questions about that text. In the sentence completion items pupils have much less contextual information to use in order to determine the missing word. Therefore pupils who rely heavily on contextual cues to draw even simple inferences may score less well on this section of the NGRT. The lack of contextual cues will mean that

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pupils have to rely more heavily on their word knowledge (vocabulary) in order to successfully answer the more difficult sentence completion items where the vocabulary may be considered challenging for pupils in that age range. Therefore pupils with a more extensive vocabulary may perform better on the sentence completion items. 

In sentence completion items the pupils also need to rely more heavily on syntactic cues (the structure of a sentence) and their own knowledge of grammatical features when deciding which of the five possible options best completes the sentence. Some of the distractors that are used in the sentence completion items have been chosen as they are semantically (in meaning) or graphically (in written form) similar to the target word; however using any of these distractors would make the sentence grammatically incorrect. Therefore the pupil is required to read both the sentence and all five of the answer options very closely in order to determine the correct answer. 

Although pupils need to be able to make single local inferences in order to answer the sentence completion questions they do not need to employ any of the more complex global inferencing skills required in the passage completion section of the test. Therefore a pupil who has difficulty understanding longer texts or making complex inferences may perform significantly better on the sentence completion section of the NGRT. 

If a pupil obtains an unexpected score, for example a score that is significantly different from the score they achieve in the passage comprehension section of the test, teachers may want to examine the pupil’s script and look at their response patterns. This will help identify areas that the pupils finds difficult and that need to be targeted for development.  For example, do they need to do additional oral language work in order to develop their vocabulary or work on grammar and sentence construction through a combination of tasks. If there is no clear response pattern, teachers may want to check that the score achieved by the pupil reflects their true ability in sentence completion and is not the result of any external factors. In these cases the teacher could use the SRS to re‐test the pupil. 

Passage comprehension 

In the passage comprehension section pupils need to use a variety of reading skills to read up to four passages and answer a number of questions on each passage.  In reading and answering the texts pupils are expected to make global as well as local inferences. Each text is accompanied by a range of item types including: 

•  Context comprehension •  Retrieval •  Inference and deduction •  Organisation of texts •  Writer’s use of language •  Writer’s purpose and viewpoints •  Social, cultural and historic tradition. 

The scores pupils obtain on this section of the test are influenced by their ability across a wide range of reading skills.

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Pupils who are very good at decoding but poor at inference and deduction may obtain a significantly lower stanine score on this section of the test.  However, if there is a very large difference between the stanine scores in this direction it is important look at the pupil’s test script and investigate whether the pupil reached the end of the test or whether the score they obtained was based on fewer passages either because they ran out of time or because they inadvertently omitted a passage. If this score is unexpected and not the result of the pupil running out of time or omitting a passage the teacher may want to look at their NGRT test booklet in detail in order to find out if their response patterns highlight a particular area of difficulty. 

Early feedback from teachers is that the majority of pupils will achieve scores that are within one or two stanines: for example 2:3 or 7:6 and for exceptionally good readers 9:8 or 7:9.  It is likely that just a small number of pupils will need additional investigation as indicated above but this aspect of NGRT now enables screening and progress tracking for large groups of pupils andmore meaningful individual profiling from a single test. 

Example 

Ryan was 11 years and 5 months when he took Test 3A.  His raw score for sentence completion was 12/20 and for passage comprehension 26/32.  This gave Ryan a standard score for the whole test of 111; a stanine of 4 for sentence completion; a stanine of 7 for passage comprehension. 

Ryan encountered difficulty in sentence completion as the items became more difficult and dependent on more sophisticated vocabulary and the ability to differentiate between words that are similar both semantically and graphically.  For example: 

The chairman had to __________ in the debate. 

Ryan chose ‘implicate’ rather than ‘intervene’.  Likewise: 

The ______ juror accepted the bribe from the defendant. 

The correct option, ‘dishonest’ was passed over for ‘discriminated’. 

However, Ryan knew the meaning of ‘misconstrued’ (ignoring other similar distracters) so his performance is a little uneven. 

It is clear that Ryan benefits from contextual cues provided by an extended text, whether fiction or non‐fiction.  His lowest score was for ‘Wind in the Willows’ but overall he was able to answer questions of all types very well. 

Ryan needs to work on reading accuracy to ensure that he can discriminate between words that look the same or have a close but not identical meaning and would benefit from extending his vocabulary a little more, probably through reading for pleasure rather than direct instruction.