Abstract

Literature supporting the use of informational texts with preschool children has increased in recent years. However, many preschool classrooms still focus on narrative text, and teachers are often unsure how to provide support for children's comprehension of informational texts. An assessment addressing preschool children's informational text comprehension will help teachers understand what children can do with informational texts and point out demands or tasks that children should be able to handle. A comprehension assessment for preschool children focusing on text purpose, text features, text retell, and comprehension of text structures has not been available. To fit this need, recent effort has focused on developing The Early Expository Text Comprehension Assessment (EECA), which previous studies have found to be reliable and valid. However, the latest iteration, developed in 2016, identified multiple problematic items based on a many-facets Rasch analysis, and problems with administrator consistency were noted. To further develop the EECA, changes were made to problematic items and the assessment was fully digitized. This pilot study tested a beta version of the next iteration of the EECA on twelve participants at the BYU preschool to identify additional changes that could be made before submitting the revised assessment to a more comprehensive full-scale study for analysis of reliability and validity. Results identified additional changes to apply to the assessment including suggestions for improving child engagement and responsiveness to the digitized format, administrator prompts, technical errors with the assessment program, and improvements to individual test items.

Degree

College and Department

David O. McKay School of Education; Communication Disorders

Rights

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