165
as frequencies: a sum score s, out of K total number of items, is a frequency of s in
terms of the number of correct items. It can also be seen as s/K, a relative frequency
(proportion) compared to the total number of items K, and, of course, relative frequencies are often interpreted as probabilities (though this move is not philosophically innocent; see, e.g., Holland, 1990, and Borsboom, Mellenbergh, & van
Heerden, 2003). That is, given this set of K items, what is the average probability
that the reader will get each of the items correct, based on the proportion that they
did get correct?
To see how this makes sense, one must backtrack to our conception of RCA, as
follows.
• We label as RC-micro an event (Wilson, Mari, & Maul, 2019) involving a reader’s moment-by-moment understanding of a piece of text. This is related to
Kintsch’s concept of the textbase in his construction/integration (CI) model
(Kintsch, 2004), and refers to all component skills such as decoding (also known
as word recognition), and these typically are driven from a finer to a coarser lexical granularity, i.e., a reader builds meaning from text, starting from small units
(letters, sounds, words, etc.) and moving to progressively larger units. Most competent readers are not even conscious of the events at the lowest levels of granularity, unless, of course, the reader comes across a word that he or she does not
recognize, and may have to go back to sounding it out letter by letter (i.e., grapheme by grapheme). Thus each of these reading comprehension events can be
thought of as a microlevel event that is also composed of a cascade of other more
basic microlevel events, and is also contained in other microlevel events.
• In contrast, we label as RC-macro the events which integrate all of the microlevel
events which occur for a reader in the process of reading the text passage, and
may integrate other conceptions beyond those, including thoughts about other
texts and other ideas. This is related to the situation aspect of Kintsch’s CI model,
which is integrated with the textbase, to form a deeper understanding of the text,
and that is what will be stored in long-term memory. Here, we might compare
this to temperature, where the micro-events can be seen as the motion of individual molecules, which will each have properties of speed and direction in
three-dimensional space (i.e., these would be seen as constituents of kinetic
energy, a quantity different than temperature), which we cannot directly observe,
and in which we are usually not interested. In contrast, the macro-level property
of temperature is the integration over all of these molecular motions inside a
certain body, which is what we are indeed interested in.
• This leads us to reading comprehension ability, which is the overall disposition
of an individual reader to comprehend texts.
• Then, when test developers construct a RCA test, they (a) sample text passages
from a body of texts; (b) design an item universe (i.e., the population of items:
26
Guttman, 1944) of questions (items) that challenge a reader’s RCA concerning
parts of the text (including, of course, possibly whole texts, and across different
26 The definition (or content) of this item universe is often referred to as the “domain”.
6.3 Constructing values of quantities
as frequencies: a sum score s, out of K total number of items, is a frequency of s in
terms of the number of correct items. It can also be seen as s/K, a relative frequency
(proportion) compared to the total number of items K, and, of course, relative frequencies are often interpreted as probabilities (though this move is not philosophically innocent; see, e.g., Holland, 1990, and Borsboom, Mellenbergh, & van
Heerden, 2003). That is, given this set of K items, what is the average probability
that the reader will get each of the items correct, based on the proportion that they
did get correct?
To see how this makes sense, one must backtrack to our conception of RCA, as
follows.
• We label as RC-micro an event (Wilson, Mari, & Maul, 2019) involving a reader’s moment-by-moment understanding of a piece of text. This is related to
Kintsch’s concept of the textbase in his construction/integration (CI) model
(Kintsch, 2004), and refers to all component skills such as decoding (also known
as word recognition), and these typically are driven from a finer to a coarser lexical granularity, i.e., a reader builds meaning from text, starting from small units
(letters, sounds, words, etc.) and moving to progressively larger units. Most competent readers are not even conscious of the events at the lowest levels of granularity, unless, of course, the reader comes across a word that he or she does not
recognize, and may have to go back to sounding it out letter by letter (i.e., grapheme by grapheme). Thus each of these reading comprehension events can be
thought of as a microlevel event that is also composed of a cascade of other more
basic microlevel events, and is also contained in other microlevel events.
• In contrast, we label as RC-macro the events which integrate all of the microlevel
events which occur for a reader in the process of reading the text passage, and
may integrate other conceptions beyond those, including thoughts about other
texts and other ideas. This is related to the situation aspect of Kintsch’s CI model,
which is integrated with the textbase, to form a deeper understanding of the text,
and that is what will be stored in long-term memory. Here, we might compare
this to temperature, where the micro-events can be seen as the motion of individual molecules, which will each have properties of speed and direction in
three-dimensional space (i.e., these would be seen as constituents of kinetic
energy, a quantity different than temperature), which we cannot directly observe,
and in which we are usually not interested. In contrast, the macro-level property
of temperature is the integration over all of these molecular motions inside a
certain body, which is what we are indeed interested in.
• This leads us to reading comprehension ability, which is the overall disposition
of an individual reader to comprehend texts.
• Then, when test developers construct a RCA test, they (a) sample text passages
from a body of texts; (b) design an item universe (i.e., the population of items:
26
Guttman, 1944) of questions (items) that challenge a reader’s RCA concerning
parts of the text (including, of course, possibly whole texts, and across different
26 The definition (or content) of this item universe is often referred to as the “domain”.
6.3 Constructing values of quantities