Early Grade Writing Assessment: An Instrument Model.

Area of Science:

• Educational Psychology
• Language Acquisition
• Psychometrics

Background:

• UNESCO promoted a model instrument for assessing foundational Spanish writing skills.
• Existing tools and literature reviews informed the assessment's development.

Purpose of the Study:

• To document learners' basic writing skills using the Early Grade Writing Assessment (EGWA).
• To map writing skills in composing units of increasing complexity for meaning communication.

Main Methods:

• Validation and standardization of EGWA in the Canary Islands, Spain.
• Cross-sectional design with 1,653 Spanish-speaking students in Grades 1-3.
• Analysis of EGWA's internal structure and psychometric properties.

Main Results:

• EGWA demonstrated satisfactory psychometric characteristics with a four-factor internal structure.
• Prevalence of learning disabilities (LD) in transcription was found to be 2 per 100 students.
• Statistically significant differences in sentence and text production were observed between students with and without LD in transcription.

Conclusions:

• EGWA is a psychometrically sound instrument for assessing early grade writing skills in Spanish.
• The study identified key differences in writing development for Spanish-speaking children with LD in transcription.
• Findings contribute to understanding writing models and learning disabilities in early literacy development.