Designing Philosophy of Cognitive-Based Reading Ability Assessment

The theory of ―learning in, for, and as Assessment‖ is promoted in educational measurement and evaluation research field in recent years. According to a survey of the literature, this paper introduces two basic reading abilities, namely the basic one and the applied one, to improve understanding of English readings. The basic one is the ability of vocabularies recognizing, retrieving, reasoning, generalizing, and abstracting of the whole materials. Synchronously a verbal efficiency theory is introduced to show the result of the resources the basic reading consumes when talking about readers’ final understanding. It is concluded that the applied reading ability should contain the integration and synthesizing of multi-channel resources, critical thinking, and high-level analyzing. Finally, a new reading experience with the help of today’s information technology is also provided.