The Cloze Procedure

The cloze procedure is an effective informal assessment tool used by teachers that “examines students’ understanding of a text” (p. 275). The teacher asks students to “supply the deleted words in a passage taken from a text they’ve read” (p. 275). While this may seem like a simple task, it is actually quite challenging because in order to find the correct words a student needs to have a strong understanding “of the content of the passage, vocabulary words, and sentence structure ” (p. 275). This assessment can be administered along with other informal assessments including story retellings, running records, and think-alouds at the beginning, middle, and end of the year and can serve as an excellent aid in developing the class curriculum. No matter what informal assessment is used, teachers need to “consider whether they’re assessing literal, inferential, critical, or evaluative thinking” (p.275).

According to “Instructional Strategies Online”, the cloze procedure can be administered by using a variety of techniques. For instance, a teacher should make sure the length of the blanks are the same in order to not include visual cues about the length of omitted words. Another good suggestion is to leave the first and last sentences intact with all punctuation to allow the student to grasp what the passage is about. In order to assess the student’s “knowledge of the topic or their abilities to use semantic cues, delete content words which carry meaning, such as nouns, main verbs, adjectives and adverbs. To assess students' use of syntactic cues, delete some conjunctions, prepositions and auxiliary words” (2009). The site also suggests omitting every fifth word to ensure the students will be challenged but also allows the student to succeed.

The teacher can adapt the cloze procedure for the class in a variety of ways. The first way can be used for beginning readers by offering two to three answer options for each blank. That way a beginning reader can assess what he or she knows about the passage and choose the right answer. Another option is to only give the first or last letter of the word in the blank. The student can run through the vocabulary he or she knows and come to the correct answer. The final suggestion is to simply offer a blank every five to ten words and allow more experienced readers a chance to come to the right conclusion.




Resources:

Tompkins, Gail E. (2010). Literacy for the 21st Century: A Balanced Approach.

“Instructional Strategeis Online” (2009) http://olc.spsd.sk.ca/de/pd/instr/strats/cloze/index.html