Baghaei,
P., & Tabatabaee, M. (2015). The
C-Test: An Integrative Measure of Crystallized Intelligence. Journal of Intelligence, 3(2), 46-58.
This is a short and
clear paper about the C-test, a closure test.
In classical closure tests, every n-th word in the text is omitted. The child is required to complete the missing
words.
The C-test is a new
kind of closure test. The test consists
of four to six text paragraphs. In each
paragraph, beginning from the second word in the second sentence, the second
part of each second word is omitted. There
are usually 20 to 25 part words in each paragraph. In order to give the child enough context,
the first and last sentence in each paragraph remains intact. For each correct word that is completed the
child gets one point.
Here is an example of
a C – test paragraph:
If you were to ask
most people who Charles Darwin was, many of them would reply that he was the
man who said that we were descended from monkeys. They wo___ be wr___. Darwin
d___ no mo___ than sug___ the possi___. What h___ said, a___ proved b___
thousands o___ examples, w___ that ov___ millions o___ years ani___ and pla___
have cha___. This he called evolution.
What does the test
measure?
The test measures verbal
ability in the first and second language.
Scholars argue that the processing done in this test resembles natural
language processing.
The test also measures
integration of knowledge about the context (general information), semantic
knowledge (knowledge about meaning and content), grammatical knowledge,
morphological knowledge (knowledge about the meaning units that make up words),
lexical knowledge (vocabulary), and orthographical knowledge (spelling rules).
There's no doubt this
test is affected by reading and reading comprehension skills, as well as by
fluid ability and short term memory. The
larger the segment of text the child reads in order to complete a word, the
higher his score on the C-test.
Difficulties on this
test can arise from hasty closure (ending a sentence before it ends), narrow
focus (using only the immediate context), wrong spelling, mismatch of singular
and plural forms, choosing a wrong word out of a right category, relying too
much on genera knowledge (completing according to general knowledge and not
according to the text's requirements), inattention to grammatical nuances,
automatic completion using highly frequent words and difficulty retrieving
lexical items. It's harder to complete
words in long and complex sentences, since it's more difficult to understand
these syntactical structures and they load working memory.