The Educational Review, USA

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Article http://dx.doi.org/10.26855/er.2019.08.001

Assessing written language in Greek: Validity and reliability considerations

Ioanna Talli

Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece.

*Corresponding author: Ioanna Talli, Email: tallijoan@yahoo.com

Published: August 7,2019

Abstract

This study aims at contributing to the reading assessment tools for Greek speaking population by evaluating the validity and reliability of decoding and reading comprehension measures. We tested 173 monolingual Greek children (aged 7-10) from elementary school Grades 2, 3, and 4, which were divided into three age groups: (i) 7-8 years, (ii) 8-9 years, (iii) 9-10 years. We employed the following measures: Word decoding measures (WDM): (i) a word and a non-word reading test and (ii) a reading fluency test. Reading comprehension measures (RCM): (i) a standardized reading comprehension test and (ii) a reading comprehension test based on the French test ECoSSe (Epreuve de Compréhension Syntaxico-Sémantique [Test of syntactico-semantic comprehension]).We investigated the convergent validity of these measures and found significant and strong (S & S) correlations between all these measures for the 7-year-old children; for the 8-year-old and 9-year-old groups S & S correlations were only found within each measure category. Furthermore, to investigate the external consistency of these measures we performed test-retest reliability and administered them for a second time after two weeks to a smaller group of 30 individuals (10 for each grade) of this cohort. Correlation analysis indicated S & S correlation. We also investigated internal consistency by performing split-half reliability, which indicated very high estimate for all tests except the second RCM. These results show the interdependence of different aspects of reading abilities in the early stage of reading development.

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How to cite this paper

Assessing written language in Greek: Validity and reliability considerations

How to cite this paper: Talli I. (2019). Assessing written language in Greek: Validity and reliability considerations. The Educational Review, USA, 3(8), 87-95.

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.26855/er.2019.08.001