English Education Professor Young-Ju Lee

논문 초록 (Abstract)

This study investigates the possibility of a difference in the difficulty of 3-point question passages in the CSAT English exam after the introduction of criterion-referenced assessment. In all, 64 CSAT English reading passages with three-point questions from 2013 to 2023 and 13 metrics of the Coh-Metrix program for text difficulty were examined, including technical indices, vocabulary information, vocabulary diversity, cohesion, syntactic complexity, and standard readability. The results reveal significant differences in word syllable count, Flesch Reading Ease(FRE), and Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level(FKGL) metrics. This suggests that the difficulty of 3-point question passages in the English section of the CSAT has slightly increased after the introduction of criterion-referenced assessment. Furthermore, a comparative analysis was done of the difficulty of passages for three types of question formats continuously featured in the English section of the CSAT before and after the introduction of criterion-referenced assessment. The results show no significant difference in text difficulty for the fill-in-the-blank inference question type. However, the difficulty of passages for grammar judgment questions and choosing the appropriate location for a given sentence in the context of a passage showed a slight increase in text difficulty after the introduction of criterion-referenced assessment. Implications of this study for item writing guidelines for both CSAT and classroom tests are also discussed.