Cultural schemata: Iranian students' test-taking processes for cloze tests

Abstract

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to report on a study to determine the possible effects of cultural schemata on Iranian students' test-taking processes for cloze tests.

Design/methodology/approach – A total of 116 students were selected as the participants. They were divided into two groups. One group completed a culturally familiar version of a cloze test, while the other did culturally unfamiliar version of the test. A number of unfamiliar words in the original cloze passage were changed to more familiar ones in the modified version. The participants were interviewed, and their retrospective protocols on the test-taking processes and the information they could recall from the passage after they had completed the test were documented. The two groups' test-taking activities were compared in terms of: demonstrating appropriate meaning making of the key terms while finding missing data and recalling, item performance, the amount of text information they had benefited from to fill in the blanks and the quantities and qualities of the final recalls.

Findings – The findings suggest that the students, who read the culturally familiar cloze text, generally understood the text to a greater extent which resulted in a higher score in comparison with those who read the original text. These results support the findings of some previous studies that cloze tests can measure higher order processing abilities.

Originality/value – The paper contributes to the literature on effects of cultural schemata on students' test-taking processes for cloze tests and is original in that it is one of the few conducted in the Middle East.