6533b834fe1ef96bd129d4ee

RESEARCH PRODUCT

National survey of reading comprehension in Finland

subject

description

As a part of an extensive project for the evaluation of the Finnish comprehensive school, a recently developed reading comprehension measure; a hierarchy-rating test, and a more conventional multiple-choice task were used to assess reading comprehension skills in population-based samples of 2,891 sixth-graders (12‐13 years old) and 1,953 (15‐16 years old) ninth-graders. The hierarchy-rating task was constructed within the theoretical framework proposed by W. Kintsch and van Dijk (1978). It was designed to examine the cognitively high-level text processing, or macroprocessing, of expository passages. The multiple-choice task and the hierarchy-rating task showed only a moderate intercorrelation. Girls outperformed boys regardless of the comprehension measure. Performance on both measures, but particularly on hierarchy-rating, correlated with school achievement (r=0.44 and 0.53 respectively, p50.001). In general, the results are in agreement with previous research. The paper also discusses the educational implications of the survey.