IELTS Research Reports

Construct validity in the IELTS Academic Reading testThe findings from this part of the study suggest then, that in the first year of undergraduate study atleast, the types of materials students need to read on their courses, and the ways they need to go aboutreading these material are subject to a good deal of variation. This feature of academic study pointsto the difficulties inherent in trying to conceive of some generalist construct of academic reading, onethat has clear relevance to all disciplinary contexts. The implications of this situation are discussed inthe final sections of the report.5.2 Specific findingsAlong with these general findings were a number of more specific findings that emerged from the data,ones that provide greater detail about some of the differences observed between the two domains.Epistemic entitiesIt was noticed in the two task corpora (IELTS and academic) that the types of entities that students/test-takers needed to focus on in their reading were generally of a different order. In the IELTS testsamples, for example, these entities were typically characterised as ‘information’, as exemplified in thefollowing sample rubrics (our emphasis):Do the following statements agree with the information given in the Reading Passage?(Sample 1.1)Which paragraph contains the following information?(Sample 2.2)In the academic tasks, by contrast, this knowledge tended to be characterised in a variety of ways.Firstly it was noticed that it was quite rare in fact for students to be asked to engage with ‘information’per se; instead they needed to contend with a range of different entities. Most prominent among thesewas a characterisation of knowledge as ‘concept’ (or related entities – ‘model’, ‘definition’ and thelike), as seen in a number of tasks in the academic corpus. Among the more humanities disciplines,we also saw an emphasis on entities associated with the ideas of particular scholars – including‘arguments’, ‘viewpoints’, ‘theses’, ‘perspectives’ etc. Other entity-types were those related to theoutcomes of empirical research eg ‘studies’ and ‘findings’.This contrast in the epistemic entities in the two domains points to a more ‘constructivist view’of knowledge in the case of the academic tasks, where knowledge is typically seen to arise fromthe thinking and researching of individual scholars in a field, or from the collective disciplinarycommunity as a whole (Myers, 1992). The contrasting focus in IELTS on reading content as‘information’ suggests instead a more positivist view of knowledge, where, as Hill and Parry (1992)suggest, “authorship is essentially anonymous” (p 439).Interpretative readingsThese different ways of conceiving of academic knowledge were found to have implications forthe way that this knowledge needed to be engaged with in the two domains. Thus, we saw that theessential task for students in many of the IELTS items was to demonstrate a basic comprehension ofthe propositional content of reading material. By contrast, the focus of many of the academic tasks wasnot only to arrive at a basic understanding of material, but also to ‘work’ with this material in order toproffer some interpretation of it. This basic requirement of academic study was well summarised byone informant thus:IELTS Research Reports Volume 11247