During the cloze procedure, students attempt to get “closure” while reading a passage with several sentences. The first sentence is unchanged. In the rest of the text, blanks replace words in a pattern, such as every fifth, tenth or fifteenth word. Better readers can be expected to fill in more blanks. Cloze is used as an assessment of students’ reading skills, such as word recognition, prediction and comprehension. Fifty-eight percent accuracy on the test suggests the student is reading satisfactorily. Instructors also employ cloze as a teaching strategy to get students to focus on context clues, vocabulary, relationships among words, phonics and prediction skills. During a cloze activity, students are called upon to predict words, check for meaning and justify their answers.
In a cloze activity or assessment, students will need to make several substitutions. For instance, they may need to predict the word based on context clues. In “The boy throws the ball, and the dog _______ to get it,” students are expected to use their knowledge of the situation to predict that the dog “runs.” In some cloze sentences, one or more letters of the missing word may be included as a phonics clue for the reader. In “The girl hit the n________ with the hammer,” attaching the “n” to the blank can help students guess the correct word, “nail.” Students can also use vocabulary in the sentence to help them make predictions. In “The mother cat licked her _________,” if students recognize “mother” and “cat,” they will be more likely to suggest “kittens” to fill the blank.
A maze test is usually given to older elementary, middle school and high school students. It’s used to assess a reader’s comprehension skills. In a reading passage, the first sentence is left intact. Following that, every seventh word is omitted. For each of these, the student has the choice of three options: the correct word and two distracters. The wrong answers shouldn’t be very difficult to read, and they should be about the same length as the right response. The passages are usually short and can be completed in 1 to 3 minutes.
A maze passage could begin: “The sun is the center of our solar system. The closest planet to the sun (is/was/its) Mercury, and the farthest is Neptune. (Pluto/ Earth/Moon) is third in line, following Venus.” The maze procedure can be used several times a year to monitor student progress in reading comprehension. It's sometimes combined with an oral reading test that assesses how well students can decode words. It’s possible that readers can have a good understanding of phonics but don't comprehend the text because too much of their focus is on saying the words. If students continually choose correct answers on a maze test, the teacher can be reasonably certain they understand the passages. However, many mistakes indicate that the student is not focusing on comprehension and may be hung up on simply pronouncing words correctly.