Past reading research suggests that measures of reading comprehension should be made context dependent. Reading comprehension test questions that are context dependent are best answered by examinees only after the accompanying passages have been read. Recently, there has been some disagreement concerning the exact importance of context dependence in the measurement of reading comprehension. Empirical research generally has used an item analysis approach to insure context dependence of reading measures; item flaws are considered sources of variance to be removed from reading measures. The logical perspective in reading research assumes that context dependent and context absent test performance are related, and that scores obtained without the benefit of contextual passages can reflect overall reading ability. Research has shown that context dependent and context absent item answering skills are significantly correlated, suggesting that the importance of context dependence in measures of reading comprehension is low. (SRT)