Measuring the Primary Effect of Reading: Reading-Storage Technique, Understanding Judgments, and Cloze

The newly developed reading-storage (RS) type of test was evaluated by comparing it to a modified version of the cloze test in three experiments involving 48 college students reading passages at four levels of difficulty. The experiments involved the following conditions: reading versus non-reading of passages, varying degrees of passage deletion, and varying amounts of interpolated activity between passages and tests. The RS test seemed to be more reliable and equally valid as the cloze test in measuring gain in understanding during reading. The RS type of test appears to offer a better objective technique for measuring the primary effect of reading.