The Development of a Reading Comprehension Test

Reading comprehension has an important place in lifelong learning. It is an interactive process between the reader and the text. Students need reading comprehension skills at all educational levels and for all school subjects. Determining the level of students' reading comprehension skills is the subject of testing and evaluation. Tests used to measure students' success are expected to provide accurate and reliable information. Therefore, the aim of this study is to develop a valid and reliable reading comprehension test appropriate for fourth grade reading comprehension learning outcomes. The participants in the study were 245 fourth graders from three schools at low, middle and high socioeconomic levels in the central district of Kars. Items with discrimination indices below .30 and those that did not differ by 27% in the upper and lower groups on the independent groups t-test were excluded from the test. The difficulty indices of the test items ranged from .37 to .79. The KR-20 reliability coefficient was found to be 0.83, indicating that this multiple choice reading comprehension test is valid and reliable.