The Extensive Reading Foundation's Online Self- Placement Test The Extensive Reading Foundation in conjunction with Mark Brierley, Richard Lemmer and Brett Reynolds

Background No online placement test of graded reader reading level EPER's test is commercial and not widely available EPER's reading test takes a hour EPER's placement test is cloze and involves writing

Overview The OSPT: is designed to rough-match fluent reading ability to already published graded reader series uses the ERF Graded Reading Scale to set reading levels will be freely available to everyone is an informal placement test and should not be used for evaluation uses already published graded reading material as source texts is still in development (pre-beta) instructions will be in (easy) English initially (later with multiple-language interfaces) is funded by the ERF

The data The following data will be collected: background information o name o institution (for students) o years studying English o years doing ER o first language o option for ing the results performance data on the test Note: No privately identifiable data will be leave the ERF or be made public at any time

The data The data from the tests will be used to: refine the test compare ability levels for subjects within age groups and L1s and between them The data will not (initially) be made available to the general public We'll probably write an academic paper about the test and its design and another about the data it generates

The techy stuff The ERF OSPT: is adaptive - the algorithm responds to previous performance is timed - reading time and response times are logged and form part of the algorithm has no back-tracking - students cannot go back to the text when answering comprehension questions asks what students think - there are questions on how easy students found the text has a pool of texts - new ones can be added for different contexts Here's the pre-beta version:

The test - the first page

The first page - they select a text at or about their level

They are taken to a text at or about their level

The test - the test questions Impressionistic question Comprehension questions

Impressionistic questions about the text they just read

Comprehension questions - content Guidelines: Easy - no trick questions, no difficult vocabulary or grammar, no double negatives Explicitly stated or unequivocally implied information Story-based - Non-trivial information on characters and places and key information In order - information follows the text One item per question o The tall thing in the story is a person named John  The tall thing in the story is a person  The person's name is John Unrelated questions

Multiple-choice questions - how many?

Comprehension questions Around 10 true/false questions Written by two people Edited and selected by a third person

The test - adapting to performance Next test chosen based on performance Easier text or more difficult text "Homes in" on student's level

Contributors The ERF wish to thank the following publishers for allowing us to use portions of their graded readers in the test.

Asking for help The ERF would like volunteers to help with the development of the test by: asking their students to take the test suggesting appropriate texts write texts for us giving feedback on how students take the test contributing ideas for how to design the test contributing ideas for how to publicize the test in fact any help at all....

Question Time Who would use the test? Should the test be password protected? Should teachers be allowed to set up group tests for their students and have data reported to them? Should we prevent students from taking the test more than one time so they don't 'improve' their rating? What should we do with the overall data?

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