What is Maze?
Maze is a standardized measure of reading comprehension. The purpose of a maze procedure is to measure the reasoning processes that constitute comprehension. Specifically, Maze assesses the student’s ability to construct meaning from text using word recognition skills, background information and prior knowledge, familiarity with linguistic properties such as syntax and morphology, and reasoning skills. Acadience Reading Maze adds reading for meaning silently as another indicator of reading comprehension along with ORF and Retell. With Acadience Reading, these three measures provide a more complete picture of reading proficiency.
Maze can be given to a whole class at the same time, to a small group of students, or to individual students. Using standardized directions, students are asked to read a passage silently and to circle their word choices. By design, approximately every seventh word in the Maze passages has been replaced by a box containing the correct word and two distractor words. The student receives credit for selecting the words that best fit the omitted words in the reading passage. The scores that are recorded are the number of correct and incorrect responses. The Maze Adjusted Score, which compensates for guessing, is calculated based on the number of correct and incorrect responses.
For more information please see the Assessment Manual located on the
Acadience® Reading K–6 download page.