Assessing academic reading in students entering higher education

Abstract

This study presents an original instrument for evaluating reading comprehension, used in the Diagnostic Test of Communication Skills that was applied to students who entered a Chilean university, in the period 2017-2020, in order to determine their level of reading comprehension, applied to academic texts, at the time of beginning their higher education. This diagnostic test was developed according to a model that distinguishes three major reading skills, broken down into more specific learning outcomes, ranging from locating literal information to evaluating form and textual content. The results show that an important group of the evaluated youth does not have a satisfactory level of academic reading and presents difficulties in answering items that evaluated higher level implicit reading tasks, such as paragraph relationships, inferences, and interpretation of communicative purposes. It is concluded that measures are needed to encourage academic reading in students entering higher education, especially the extraction of non-explicit information through comprehensive reading, since this skill is directly linked to the learning and the acquisition of disciplinary discursive traditions.