Abstract
Though assessment of reading literacy has a long tradition in the Czech Republic, the presence of standardized reading measures is very limited, especially when it comes to reading comprehension. The available tools either measure comprehension on the sentence level or are designed to assess comprehension of a narrative text based on retelling a story.
The ongoing investigation of the TAČR (Technology Agency of the Czech Republic) project aims to respond to the limits of current psychodiagnostic testing and develop a new diagnostic battery of literacy skills. We build on current trends in the foreign literature and bring new approaches to evaluate different forms of comprehension which contribute to the development of functional literacy from the developmental perspective.
The new comprehensive battery, therefore, includes a variety of tools measuring decoding and reading-related skills as well as text comprehension skills. Comprehension is assessed on different levels (explicit, implicit, and interpretative) and under several conditions: filling in missing words to the text, answering questions after oral/silent reading or listening to narrative/exploratory texts.
The battery also includes questionnaires for children, parents and teachers to enable the examiner to map the socio-environmental and motivational factors. In the poster we present preliminary data of the standardized study of the battery administered to 929 monolingual, Czech-speaking primary school pupils (1st-5th grade) in the beginning and at the end of the academic year 2018/2019 and 2019/2020.
We will present a descriptive analysis of the performance of the representative sample and psychometric properties of the measures.