Panorama: A narrative history of standardized elementary reading comprehension test development and reading test authors in the United States, 1914-1919. (Volumes I and II

This study explores the philosophical and social assumptions that shaped reading comprehension test development from 1914-1919 by analyzing reading comprehension tests published during the period and examining the lives of selected reading comprehension test authors. The introductory chapter outlines the theoretical, methodological, and organizational structures and scope of the study. The second chapter identifies scientific determinism as the ideological frame of reference that dominated educational research and reading comprehension test research early in this century. The study examines the philosophical assumptions upon which the ideology was based from three European philosophers, Comte, Spencer, and Darwin, which served as the foundation for the emerging American philosophy of pragmatism as espoused by Pierce, James, and Dewey. In addition, this chapter examines the affect of the philosophical assumptions on the social ideas of Americans by investigating the intersection of philosophy and history through an exploration of two social movements and their dominate ideas.;Several chapters follow that detail how the underlying philosophical assumptions that formed the ideology of scientific determinism served as the framework for the use and dominance of the empirical research model in reading comprehension test development. This study examines how the philosophical assumptions were made explicit and confirmed through the reading comprehension test authors' lives, agendas, hopes, interests, tests, and research. It documents the consequences and occurrences of the philosophical assumptions in the lives of selected researchers and identifies their use in the theoretical assumptions and research models developed for reading comprehension testing. In addition, the study investigates through biography the impact of the philosophical assumptions of scientific determinism on the individual consciousness of selected reading researchers and their social relations by demonstrating how reading comprehension test authors used their ideological frame of reference to legitimate the empirical model of research for inquiry into reading comprehension test development and as a means of gaining and retaining the social control of acceptable ways of understanding written matter.;The study suggests that new understandings gained in this study which situate the dominate empirical research model within the context of historical and social structures of the past be revisited to view the broader significance of recent calls for change in reading comprehension testing and to serve as a starting point for change.