Legacy resource note: This page comes from an earlier resource on designing reading and listening comprehension questions that reveal whether people actually understand the material. The original Gumroad sales links have been retired. The useful idea remains: assessment questions should test understanding, not just recall.
Reading Between The Lines
Reading Between The Lines is about a practical assessment problem: how do you know whether someone genuinely understands what they have read or heard?
The answer is not more questions. It is better questions: prompts that require inference, judgement, explanation, and transfer.
Design Questions That Reveal Understanding
The framework was designed for course writers, teachers, trainers, and learning designers who need to create reading and listening comprehension questions that can work in online quizzes, assessment tasks, and self-marking platforms.
The core distinction is between questions that check explicit knowledge and questions that require people to infer, interpret, apply, or explain what the text means. A learner can often repeat information without understanding it. Better assessment items make that difference visible.
The original resource covered 18 different assessment-item types and explained how to use them to move beyond simple recall.
Free Template And Related Resource
The most useful remaining public resource is the Reading Between The Lines template. It summarises the assessment-question types in a short table that can be adapted for course design, online learning, and learner-support materials.
For more context, see How To Check Understanding, which explains the same problem for course writers in more detail.
Where This Fits Now
This older resource sits inside a wider body of work on assessment, learning design, capability development, and evidence of understanding. If you are working on assessment design or capability development, start with About or Consulting.
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