Emotional Information in a Reading Comprehension Assessment Affects Examinees’ Response Choices

Location

Measurement and Assessment (Session 1 Breakouts)

Proposal Track

Research Project

Session Format

Presentation

Abstract

The Multiple-choice Online Causal Comprehension Assessment - College (MOCCA-College) is a cloze reading comprehension assessment for college students. Each MOCCA-College item involves a short text with one sentence missing. Examinees have three choices to replace the missing sentence: (1) Causally Coherent Inference (CCI; the best response option), (2) Elaboration (ELA) response, and (3) Paraphrase (PAR). We explored the nature of emotional content in these items to see what kind of emotional information contributed to which response options participants chose. Specifically, does a change in emotion information, requiring a mental update, influence examinees response choice? We developed an emotion features coding scheme and coded items previously identified as having explicit emotion. We then performed three multiple regressions to explore which of our emotion features predicted the likelihood of choosing the CCI, PAR, or ELA of an item. Overall, emotion-related information in our test items predict the response choices of our examinees. Specifically, positive emotion in the beginning of the text and the PAR response option being inconsistent with the beginning emotion contributed to examinees choosing the ELA response. Our study highlights emotional content as an influence of reading comprehension not typically considered in assessment development.

Keywords

reading, comprehension, emotion, assessment

Professional Bio

Heather Ness-Maddox is a third-year doctoral student in the Educational Psychology program in the Department of Learning Sciences at Georgia State University. She assists her advisor Dr. Sarah Carlson and the development of the MOCCA-C reading comprehension assessment for college students. Her research interests focus on comprehension of visual narratives, including comics and graphic novels, animation, film, and video games.

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Oct 2nd, 8:30 AM Oct 2nd, 9:30 AM

Emotional Information in a Reading Comprehension Assessment Affects Examinees’ Response Choices

Measurement and Assessment (Session 1 Breakouts)

The Multiple-choice Online Causal Comprehension Assessment - College (MOCCA-College) is a cloze reading comprehension assessment for college students. Each MOCCA-College item involves a short text with one sentence missing. Examinees have three choices to replace the missing sentence: (1) Causally Coherent Inference (CCI; the best response option), (2) Elaboration (ELA) response, and (3) Paraphrase (PAR). We explored the nature of emotional content in these items to see what kind of emotional information contributed to which response options participants chose. Specifically, does a change in emotion information, requiring a mental update, influence examinees response choice? We developed an emotion features coding scheme and coded items previously identified as having explicit emotion. We then performed three multiple regressions to explore which of our emotion features predicted the likelihood of choosing the CCI, PAR, or ELA of an item. Overall, emotion-related information in our test items predict the response choices of our examinees. Specifically, positive emotion in the beginning of the text and the PAR response option being inconsistent with the beginning emotion contributed to examinees choosing the ELA response. Our study highlights emotional content as an influence of reading comprehension not typically considered in assessment development.