Development of Listening Comprehension Tests with Narrative and Expository Texts for Portuguese Students

Abstract

This investigation aimed to develop and collect psychometric data for two tests assessing listening comprehension of Portuguese students in primary school: the Test of Listening Comprehension of Narrative Texts (TLC-n) and the Test of Listening Comprehension of Expository Texts (TLC-e). Two studies were conducted. The purpose of study 1 was to construct four test forms for each of the two tests to assess first, second, third and fourth grade students of the primary school. The TLC-n was administered to 1042 students, and the TLC-e was administered to 848 students. The purpose of study 2 was to test the psychometric properties of new items for the TLC-n form for fourth graders, given that the results in study 1 indicated a severe lack of difficult items. The participants were 260 fourth graders. The data were analysed using the Rasch model. Thirty items were selected for each test form. The results provided support for the model assumptions: Unidimensionality and local independence of the items. The reliability coefficients were higher than .70 for all test forms. The TLC-n and the TLC-e present good psychometric properties and represent an important contribution to the learning disabilities assessment field.

Developing and Validating Tests of Reading and Listening Comprehension for Fifth and Sixth Grade Students in Portugal

“…Various measures of reading assessment for elementary school students have been developed in Portugal. One of these measures was the Battery of Reading Assessment (Santos et al, 2015(Santos et al, , 2016b, which is composed of vertically scaled forms to assess word reading, listening, and reading comprehension from the first to the fourth grade. The special attention paid to the lower grades of elementary schools for assessing reading and listening comprehension can be explained by the importance and the impact of learning across the primary school years on the subsequent years.…”

“…Each test form comprised unique and common items between the test forms for the adjacent grades (see Table 1). Regarding TRC-n 5 and TLC-n 5 , anchor items (and the respective text) were derived from the test forms previously validated for fourth graders (Santos et al, 2015(Santos et al, , 2016b. To select the anchor items to be included in the test forms for the fifth grade, the mean difficulty level of the items of the texts that composed the fourth-grade test forms was computed.…”

“…Prior studies have shown that three options are optimal for multiple-choice items, being as psychometrically efficient as four or five options (Delgado and Prieto, 1998;Rodriguez, 2005). Items were developed to assess four levels of comprehension (literal, inferential, critical, and reorganization) described in the taxonomy by Català et al (2001), that was used in the development of the test forms for primary school students (Santos et al, 2015(Santos et al, , 2016b. The items and the options were developed by the researchers and were later revised by text comprehension experts, who have extensive experience in teachers' training.…”

Compreensão de textos: Diferenças em função da modalidade de apresentação da tarefa, tipo de texto e tipo de pergunta

“…A audição de cada excerto do texto e cada pergunta só pode ser feita uma vez, não sendo permitido ao aluno retroceder no teste durante a sua aplicação. Os coeficientes de fidelidade dos testes são muito altos, variando entre .70 e .98 (Santos et al, 2015). As pontuações nas formas de teste encontram-se significativamente correlacionadas com as avaliações não formais das competências de leitura e oralidade efetuadas em contexto escolar, e com resultados obtidos em provas de vocabulário e memória de trabalho, fornecendo assim evidência de validade para o teste (Viana et al, 2015).…”

Compreensão de texto argumentativo em crianças

“…Preocupação semelhante é verificada na construção de instrumentos de avaliação que contemplam uma maior diversidade de textos, como é o caso de instrumentos desenvolvidos por Ribeiro e Viana (2014) e por Santos et al (2015;, em que textos narrativos e expositivos foram considerados.…”