This paper coins and introduces the Cloze deletion, for the purpose of evaluating the readability of text passages. The idea is that we can perhaps infer a passage to be more “readable” if a reader can fill in randomly-chosen blanks.
Having read this paper, I see that the term “cloze deletion” is abused as used in Spaced repetition memory system: as described in this paper, it’s meant to be a random deletion from a passage.
Obviously, cloze procedure is some- thing like this familiar form of exami- nation. It is similar in that the subject is presented with incomplete sentences and there are blanks to be filled in from context.
But the typical sentence-completion test is for gauging a person’s knowl- edge of specific and more or less inde- pendent points of information, hence the words to be deleted are pre-evalu- ated and selected accordingly.
Q. How do SRSs abuse the term “cloze deletion”, vs its intended meaning?
A. Cloze is meant to apply to random, mechanical deletions—explicitly in contrast to carefully authored sentence-completion tests.
Q. What does “cloze” mean in “cloze deletion”?
A. Comes from “closure” in Gestalt psychology—the tendency to complete a familiar but incomplete pattern (e.g. seeing a broken circle as a whole one).