The Effect of Content Area Material on Cloze Test Performance.
Judith H. Cohen · The Journal of Reading · 1975
Cohen is involved in teacher preparation and teaches courses in reading and language arts at Queens College, New York. ■ The cloze procedure has been suggested by many as a potent tool in the measurement of readability and reading comprehension. The cloze procedure has overcome some of the major limitations that have been found with readability formulas. Specifically, cloze procedure does more than count syllables, words, and sentence length, as it measures the difficulty of a passage relative to a subject, with a particular background, interests, and purposes for reading, at a specific point in time. The cloze procedure has been applied to the measurement of passage difficulty in textbooks, as both general comprehension and specific skills needed for various different content areas could be determined. Various researchers have attempted to correlate cloze scores with multiple-choice comprehension scores, so that corresponding levels of proficiency might be ascertained. Without these so-