Online assessment of strategic reading literacy skills

•We test the possibility of assessing reading literacy skills automatically.•The assessment includes performance and online indices of the reader's behavior.•Our computer-based and paper-and-pencil assessments tools are largely equivalent.•Online self-regulation and reading behavior indices predict performance scores.

This study investigates the possibility of assessing strategic reading literacy skills with computers. The critical value of this assessment is the recording of online indices of the reader's behavior that can be interpreted in terms of strategies. The study uses materials of a standardized paper-and-pencil reading literacy test called CompLEC (Llorens et al., 2011) and a technology called Read&Answer (Vidal-Abarca et al., 2011) that presents texts and questions with a masking procedure that allows the recording of reading time and readers' actions to develop a computer-based version called e-CompLEC. We found that reliability and validity of the two versions are largely equivalent, and that e-CompLEC provides self-regulation and reading behavior indices predictive of performance. The study also shows how self-regulation is an important component of reading literacy processes.