Item discrimination of IELTS reading comprehension section: Evidence from event related potentials

Abstract

The development of international proficiency tests such as IELTS, which entail important decision making about people's academic lives, requires complex processes to ensure item discrimination. Previous research has indicated that IELTS has been ineffective in omitting distractor components, which may offer limitations in differentiating among the candidates. Among all the sections, particular attention has been paid to the reading comprehension component and it is considered as a criterion for determining whether a person is academically literate or not. While there seems to be a deep linkage between brain and reading comprehension, Event Related Potentials (ERP), as one of the methods used for measuring brain activity, allows researchers to observe reading- related brain processes and can document neural patterns at the millisecond level. This study aimed at examining item discrimination of the reading comprehension section of the IELTS exam through ERP. With a sample of 10 participants holding the band scores from 6 to 8, the reading comprehension items of a retired version of IELTS were given to the test takers as the task or the stimulus. It was found out that there is a mismatch between the proposed category of difficulty given for the reading comprehension item types and ERP evidence.