Measurement of Teenagers' Poetic Text Comprehension

Although much of the prior work stressed the importance of studying poetry during school years, there is still no scientifically grounded tool for identifying students’ level of poems comprehension. This brings us to the goals of our research which were to operationalize the concept of "poetry comprehension” and to develop a field test form of a tool aimed at measuring teenagers’ level of poetry comprehension. According to our first hypothesis, poetry comprehension can be represented as a model containing successive stages of reader's interaction with the poetic text, in which several plans can be distinguished that differ in the degree of explicitness and semantic fullness. According to the second hypothesis, practical implementation of this model in a test for adolescents is possible. In the course of our study, the first hypothesis was confirmed: we created a model of poetry comprehension and identified indicators of understanding. We conducted an exploratory study in which 132 students in grades 6-8 took part; it allowed us to identify serious problems in pupils’ understanding of poems. Based on the received data, as the most adequate form of assessment we chose a formative test with educational modules. We developed a test specification, two test forms and keys with evaluation rubrics. All of them were discussed with experts. Thus, we can say that our second hypothesis concerning the feasibility of practical implementation of the model was confirmed, although it is too early to talk about full confirmation, as the empirical testing in the target audience has not yet been carried out.