Application Knowledge Assessment Comprehension IV

This is the fourth post devoted to assessing application knowledge. The reason for the many illustrations of Assessment Tasks for application knowledge is that these tasks are like the Application-Practice Tasks used in the second stage of instructing for application knowledge. Those tasks thus serve a double duty, assessment and instruction.

This post will focus on application-knowledge Assessment Tasks for two categories of comprehension, both involving extrapolation. Assessment Tasks for application knowledge of comprehension generalizations are intended to have students manifest the implicit process of (a) cueing the retrieval of information about a relevant comprehension generalization, and then (b) transferring that information when recognizing novel objects and actions that are examples of the comprehension generalization. The categories of comprehension are determined by the two categories of extrapolation questions asked, consequence and analogy.

EXTRAPOLATION

Extrapolation questions are intended to require students to use the implicit cognitive process of extending ideas beyond the information they read or heard in order to infer consequences and analogies. Extrapolation refers to making predictions about future events by reasoning from past events. For instance, if you were interested in how many miles per gallon you could get at speeds of sixty, seventy or eighty miles per hour, you could make some extrapolations based on information given in the chart, shown below, about mileage gotten at speeds of thirty, forty and fifty miles per hour. Make extrapolations yourself by doing this exercise.

Notice how your predictions about mileage are probably based on an assumption that the relationship existing between speed and mileage found at speeds from thirty to fifty will hold up at speeds of sixty to eighty. If you did not assume that the same relationship will hold up, then you would have predicted differently. Whatever your prediction, you should be able to identify the assumption you did follow about a relationship, and to explain how your answers are logically based on that assumption.

The illustrations of extrapolation Assessment Tasks shown here are for reading comprehension because the questions are for information students read. The same kinds of questions would be for listening comprehension if students heard the information in a lecture or television program. The consequences and analogy questions asked are contained in selection-question units. There are two selections at a fifth-grade level of difficulty; one has a narrative discourse structure (literature) and the other an expository discourse structure (science).

EXTRAPOLATION-CONSEQUENCE

Questions for extrapolation-consequence ask students to predict the consequence of changing one item from a previously interpreted cause-effect relationship.

EXTRAPOLATION-ANALOGY

Analogy refers to a likeness between two things based on a similarity of attributes, circumstances or events. Questions suitable for extrapolation-analogy ask students to use a previously identified cause-effect relationship to infer what an analogous one might be.