ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the increasing role and importance of multiple source use in everyday and academic literacy activities in the 21st century. It describes a new type of assessment called Scenario-Based Assessment that provides both a framework for assessing multiple source use and takes a step toward ecological validity in assessments, in that it establishes credible literacy purposes or goals for the individual, and a structured, sequenced set of tasks or subgoals toward achieving those purposes. To illustrate how multiple sources fit into assessment contexts, people employ a well-known, cognitive framework of multiple source processing, specifically the Multiple Documents – Text-based Relevance Assessment and Content Extraction. Now is a good moment to step back and remind ourselves of the relevant goals of assessment, in contrast to a cognitive model. The scenario-based, reading comprehension assessments which we call global, integrated scenario-based assessments can be useful for achieving a number of such construct and process goals, while maintaining psychometric integrity.
