Testing comprehension of long texts (5-10 pages) is more complicated than testing shorter (1-2 page) texts. Since one purpose of giving a long text on an exam is to test macro-level skills, the summary is an appropriate type of test question. The grading of summaries, however, is problematic (with several acceptable answers) and often subjective. A more objective kind of summary is suggested here. In the guided summary completion test, students are presented with a greatly shortened version of the text (eg, a 1-paragraph summary of a 6-page text) containing several blank spaces. Blanks are placed instead of key words or sentences. Each blank would stand for a macro-level concept or structure in the text. No blank would tap information on the micro-level (ie, detail, example, or other support for macro-level idea). One possible test format is to have students fill in any number of words, from one word to a sentence. Another possibility is to list, separately, words and/or sentences from which students can fill in the blanks. (The number of phrases and sentences would be at least twice the number of blank spaces.) For the past three years, we have been using the guided summary completion as the last section of the final exam for the reading comprehension courses. The exam includes a long 6-10 page text and a variety of question types: open-end questions of general comprehension, true/false, and multiple-choice. Students' performance on this portion of the exam was found to correlate moderately with test scores on the rest of the exam. The guided summary completion is a test of global reading comprehension. PERMISSION TO REPRODUCE THIS MATERIAL HAS BEEN GRANTED BY
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