Assessing Complex Behaviors: Problems With Reification, Quantification, and Ranking

In my learning disabilities class each year, a student does a presentation on remediating reading comprehension problems. To prepare for the presentation, students read the most recent textbooks and articles that describe strategies to improve reading comprehension. At some point during the presentation, the student will say something like, "The ability to identify the main idea is crucial for reading comprehension." I casually ask the student to explain why identifying the main idea is so important for reading comprehension. The question is a trap; but, before I let the student fall into it, I ask the class to think about how reading comprehension is measured. The answer, of course, is that one way in which reading comprehension is measured is by asking readers to identify the main idea of the story. This short anecdote is meant to demonstrate that a central component of remediating reading comprehension problems is based on how reading comprehension is assessed. Unfortunately, the way in which reading comprehension is assessed by standardized measures of reading is based on an overly simplistic view of what it means to understand a text. The broader issue here concerns the way in which abstract and complex behaviors/constructs become reified, quantified, and ranked in order to be assessed and taught. Before discussing why measures of reading comprehension and other complex constructs are problematic, let me define some terms.