A Validation Study of a Middle Grades Reading Comprehension Assessment

A student’s reading skill is essential to learning. Assessing reading skills, specifically comprehension, is difficult. In the middle grades, students read to learn; and their teachers need a quick, easy assessment that provides immediate data on reading comprehension skill. This study explores the holistic validation approach of one eighth-grade informational text with comprehension questions currently included in the Adolescent Comprehension Evaluation (ACE). Thirty-three eighth-grade students from four different schools participated in the study. Multiple forms of validity evidence were used including test content, response process, internal structure, relationship to other variables, and consequences of testing. These multiple forms of validity evidence provided the researchers with insights into comprehension questions that would not have been uncovered using psychometric means of validation alone. The results of this study support ACE as a direct measure of middle grades students’ reading comprehension.