THE IOWA TESTS
Reading Comprehension
(9th Grade)
Provided by Home Ed (Home Educators of Greater Little Rock)
This test provides information about the kinds of comprehension skills students are expected to continue to develop as they proceed through high school -- skills they will use in reading texts across the curriculum, in engaging with literature, in reading and thinking about magazine and newspaper articles in and outside of school, and in extracting and evaluating ideas from a variety of sources in research projects and extracurricular reading. The passages comprising the Reading Test are all taken from previously published materials. Each test level has five passages: a fiction or narrative passage, an article about a social studies topic and one about a science topic; another nonfiction passage which may be from a biography or memoir, from an essay, or from the general interest domain; and a poem. The prose passages range in length from 440 to 650 words. Over the three levels of the test there are a total of eleven passages, which represent a diverse assortment of well-regarded authors writing in a variety of styles and for a variety of purposes.
The questions associated with each passage require students to demonstrate understanding at each of the three process levels usually associated with reading comprehension: literal, or factual understanding, inference and interpretation, and analysis and generalization. By far the greatest emphasis is on questions that address the higher-level objectives of inferring, analyzing, and generalizing, often described as critical thinking skills. Approximately 60% of the questions at Level 15 are classified in these categories, while 70% of those at Level 17/18 measure these objectives.