Innovation in Language Learning

Proficiency in reading comprehension is the ultimate goal of reading instruction at all grade levels and for all children. In Thailand, reading proficiency of students has been assessed nationally and internationally. For example, they have been tested by the national large scale assessment commonly called O-NET and PISA’s reading literacy assessment conducted by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). The assessment results from the national assessment revealed that the reading comprehension in English of Thai students was weak persistently and thus it is required that English and reading comprehension instruction should be improved. Reading comprehension involves several skills consisting of parsing sentences, understanding sentences in discourse, building a discourse structure, and then integrating this understanding with one already knows and therefore a diagnostic assessment of reading comprehension skills can be useful to diagnose weaknesses and strengths of such complex attributes of reading comprehension. Cognitive diagnostic models are psychometric models that provide diagnostic information to aid learning and instruction. This study applied a cognitive diagnostic model called a generalized Deterministic inputs, Noisy and Gate (G-DINA) model to explore strengths and weaknesses in reading comprehension of Thai students. The 9th grade student assessment data from the national large scale assessment was used. Out of 50 items measuring English proficiency, 16 reading comprehension items responded by 656,701 students were selected for the diagnostic purpose. Reading comprehension skills including vocabulary, syntax, extracting explicit information, and understanding implicit information together with student responses to 15 items were analyzed through the G-DINA model. The major finding was that the vocabulary was the most significant weakness of Thai students (the estimated skill mastery probability was 0.07) followed by syntax, extracting explicit information, and understanding implicit information with the estimated skill mastery probabilities of .11, .22, and .53, respectively. The implication for reading comprehension instruction was discussed in the paper.  

Keywords: cognitive diagnostic assessment, reading comprehension;