The last decades thirst for accountability has increased the use of tests across Europe. In many countries the results on the PISA-test has become an important premise for the education policy and also for what happens to the practice of education in classrooms. In Norway, for example, mediocre PISA-results were one of the motivational factors behind the new competence based curriculum in 2006 (Bergesen, 2006).  This influence makes it important that the tests are founded on a precise and complete concept of literacy and give a reliable picture of students reading comprehension. In this paper, I discuss three models of reading literacy and argue that the cognitive-psychological approach, which underpins the PISA-test, lacks a necessary dimension. Based on Hegel’s concept of recognition, I argue that reading literacy has an important moral dimension not captured within the cognitive-psychological framework.

Even though there are several theories about reading literacy, the testing of literacy has since the beginning been closely tied to psychology (Dole et al., 1991). Alternative approaches to reading – for example literature theory (Langer, 1995) or sociocultural theory (Barton, 2007; Lankshear 2011; Gee, 1996) – have exerted little influence, partly because the dimensions of reading that are emphasized in these approaches are difficult or not possible to measure statistically. So the framework of the major tests is mainly based on empirically grounded psychological research (Pearson & Hamm, 2005). I will first give a sketch of the two psychological approaches that has dominated testing of reading comprehension and then contrast these with the Hegelian-inspired concept of reading as recognition

The text as a given object

Until the 1970s, a behaviourist and psychometrical approach dominated the understanding of reading comprehension. The reading process was understood as a «a set of discrete skills that can be taught in isolation» (Larson & Marsh, 2005, p. 5). This view was inspired by Bloom's (1956) taxonomy of cognitive skills. His model describes a hierarchy of skills from simple recall of bits of information to more complex analysis or synthesis of information. Learning to read, in light of this model, implies to gradually acquire these skills on a more complex level (Dole et al., 1991). This means that a good reader is able to recall simple factual information from the text, but also to identify the main idea and draw inferences(Pearson & Hamm, 2005). What distinguishes this early, behaviourist-psychometric view on reading is the rather passive role of the reader. Reading is, simply put, retrieval of information and text is regarded as a “given” object of information or meaning. «Meaning resides in the text itself, and the goal of the reader is to reproduce that meaning.” (Dole et al., 1991).

The text as constructed object

The rise of cognitive psychology in the 1960s gave psychology a new foundation where the aim was «to discover and describe the meanings that human beings created out of their encounters with the world, and then to propose hypotheses about what meaning-making processes were implicated.” (Bruner, 1990). This new framework enabled a more complex understanding of the reading process. Reading is then not a “passive” reproduction of meaning, but the “active” construction of the text as a meaningful object. This view is reflected in the PISA-framework which “emphasise the interactive nature of reading and the constructive nature of comprehension” (OECD 2009).

In both of psychological approaches to reading the text is regarded as an object of information or meaning – either as a given or as a constructed object. Based on Hegel’s philosophy I propose a third view where deep reading comprehension implies the recognition of the text as a subject.

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