Agreement among college reading instruments and their relation to developmental course placement

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to investigate the assessment instruments that a southwestern community college (SWCC) used to evaluate its incoming students' academic literacy skills and to determine how well the results of those tests placed students in either college-level or developmental reading courses. The three college-level academic literacy instruments that were investigated were: the Nelson-Denny Reading Test (NDRT), the Degrees of Reading Power (DRP), and the Turrentine/Bradley Literacy Testing Battery (TBLTB), consisting of two response types: the TBLTB Multiple-Choice (TBLTB-MC) and the TBLTB Short-Answer (TBLTB-SA). Interrelationships were computed for reliability, concurrent validity and extent of agreement for placement into the three developmental reading courses. The three tests were administered to 88 students placed into the three developmental reading courses, Reading 071, Reading 081 and Reading 091, taught by the researcher during the Fall 1997 semester. The NDRT was used by the college for placement purposes. The DRP and the TBLTB were given during the first and second weeks of the semester for comparison purposes. Pearson Product-Moment correlations indicated that there were low to moderately low positive correlations among all the tests at the .01 level of confidence. The Kappas obtained between pairings of the three tests demonstrated that two of the tests showed concurrent placement validity: (1) the NDRT with the TBLTB-MC and (2) the TBLTB-MC with the TBLTB-SA. The extent of agreement exceeded the .01 level of confidence. The other tests did not show sufficient extent of agreement for placement purposes. The ANOVAS demonstrated significant mean differences among students placed into the three SWCC developmental reading classes by: (1) the NDRT and the DRP, (2) the NDRT and the TBLTB-MC and (3) the NDRT and the TBLTB-SA at the .01 level of confidence. Two other combinations of tests showed significance at the .05 level of confidence: (1) the DRP and the TBLTB-MC and (2) the DRP and the TBLTB-SA. Although the three tests did not have extent of agreement sufficient for placement into the three developmental reading classes, all three tests did agree that this sample of students did not possess college-level reading abilities.