A Comparative Study Of Two Scoring Methods Of Cloze Tests

The study examined the feasibility of the cloze test used as a placement one, and explored the influence of two main scoring methods of cloze passage——exact scoring method and conceptual scoring method on the cloze test. This research is aimed to show light on the development and assessment of placement tests. A quasi-experiment was carried out:both conceptual and exact scoring regimes were employed to code the cloze entries made by30subjects. These subjects majored in history and advertisement in Shanxi University. Both conventional statistical techniques such as means and standard deviations and more illuminative statistical techniques——generalized additive model(GAM), were applied in the analysis of the data. The cloze passage was a387-word essay on the tremendous stress in the current society and its solution from an expert. The conceptually correct answer was defined broadly as any conceptually correct alternative(even incorrect spelling and ungrammatical expression) was considered correct. Pearson product-moment correlation coefficients have been computed between conceptual and exact coding methods and Matriculation and GAM has been employed in the comparison of these two scoring regimes. The data analysis indicated that the correlation between cloze test and Matriculation was significant while the credit went for conceptual coding regime, which means cloze could be expected to measure language proficiency and be used as a placement test. Moreover, GAM reflected a real non-linearity between these two scoring methods and provided more information when conceptual coding was used, which means conceptual coding regime of cloze entries may suit placement better. Besides, the analysis of face validity of this cloze test as well as background information such as gender and subjects’confidence of their language proficiency supported the above findings.