Using Bloom's Revised Taxonomy to Analyze a Reading Comprehension Instrument

Abstract

Though the designers may claim otherwise, the vast majority of reading comprehension instruments measure a students mastery of specific skills, such as decoding or phonological awareness, rather than their ability to extract meaning from text. This article is the third in a series in which the researchers examine two specific Malaysian reading comprehension instruments developed by a team of researchers at the Universiti of Sains Malaysia. These tests were developed for the purpose of evaluating reading comprehension abilities of students in the primary grades (Test I for grade 1-3, Test II for grades 4-6) in Malaysia (NorHashim, 2006). In the previous studies, we established that the English version of the test was comparable to the Malay version, and that Blooms Revised Taxonomy: the Cognitive Dimension (Anderson, et al., 2001), could be used to classify the test items. In this study, we extend our prior work by comparing the Malay classification scheme with Blooms Revised Taxonomy: the Cognitive Dimension (Anderson, et al., 2001). We found that rarely did questions classified by the Malay structure as testing higher-order reading skills, such as evaluation, actually do so. Instead, most questions merely identified students reading skills, rather than comprehension. Thus, more work is needed in order to develop an instrument that actually measures the evaluative abilities of students as they interact with texts.