The Construction of an Instrument to Measure Some Aspects of Literary Judgment and Its Use as a Tool to Investigate Student Responses to Literature.

A test of literary judgment which could be used to investigate some aspects of a student's discrimination and response to literature was constructed for this study. Each of the two forms of the test consisted of four parts--"Thematic Imitation,""Paragraph Selection,""Title Choice," and "Distorted Images." One form of the test was administered as a silent reading test and the other as a listening test. As a reliability study both forms were administered in Montreal, Quebec, to 100 eleventh graders in one high school and again to 123 eleventh graders attending two other high schools. It was found that, when the silent reading form was given first and the listening form second, a .05 level of significance occurred in favor of the silent reading administration. A representative sample of high, middle, and low scorers were then interviewed on tape and asked to rationalize their choices of answers to Part 1 of the test. When transcripts of the taped responses were analyzed, the categories of response that were identified were guess, misreading, unsupported judgment, supported judgment, poetic preconceptions, isolated elements, narrational, technical, irrelevant association, interpretation, and self-involvement. (Author/JB)