Cloze as a Measure of Intersentential Comprehension

CLOZE TESTS ARE FREQUENTLY USED to measure reading comprehension. Although cloze is generally accepted as a global measure of reading comprehension, and cloze test results are reportedly well correlated with those of traditional comprehension tests, the question of which specific components of reading comprehension are measured by cloze tests has not been adequately explored. This study assessed the sensitivity of cloze passages as measures of the ability to use information across sentence boundaries. Three experiments were carried out. Standard cloze passages were administered to subjects; these same passages, with scrambled sentence sequences, were administered to other subjects; still other passages were used which were constructed by embedding single sentences from the original passages in other, non-supportive text. No performance differences due to sentence order or to the presence of supportive text were found, even with a timed cloze test, suggesting an important limitation on cloze as a measure of this aspect of reading comprehension. Implications of the findings are discussed.