The Implications of Content Schemata for Standardized Reading Tests

This article reports that a testee's content schemata have detrimental effects on the validity of standardized reading comprehension tests. in case that the reading passages constitute his prior background knowledge framed by regular academic pursuits focused on a major field of study. The empirical research findings on such a reliability issue have shown that the Korean subjects' familiarity with the content domain of the reading materials may substantially enhance their test performance, operated as unfair advantages over the other participants at the same level of English proficiency who do not possess technical knowledge closely related to the contents of the test passages. Based on these results, it may be argued that the reading text should be composed of maximally neutral contents to every testee to avoid the possible overlapping between a test-taker's content schemata and the content domain of the materials. Therefore, this article claims that the tenets of schema theory with its long-standing foundation on culturally predetermined content and formal schemata need to be expanded to cover professional knowledge structures, like those acquired by higher education, as the hard-wired framework of an individual's original culture-specific background knowledge.