Abstract
The evaluation of the level of young school-age pupils' reading literacy has a long tradition in the Czech Republic. Since the 1980s original Czech standardized diagnostic tools with an emphasis on decoding has been widely used in counselling centres.
Additionally, some of the standardized tools include basic diagnostic procedures to monitor reading comprehension. In particular, on the text level, the comprehension tasks are designed to assess comprehension of a narrative text based on retelling a story.
It is well accepted that this evaluation may be subjective and significantly influenced by other factors, such as, for example, the verbal fluency of the examinee, rather than his or her comprehension skills. 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 the 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 battery therefore includes tools assessing listening comprehension, different levels of comprehension (explicit, implicit, and interpretative), and comprehension of narrative and exploratory texts, as well as the basic ability to work with texts with respect to silent reading and individual writing tasks.
According to the design of the study, the tests were administered to 1000 monolingual, Czech-speaking primary school pupils (1st-5th grade) in the beginning and at the end of the academic year 2018/2019. In order to ensure representativeness of the sample, the sampling reflected socio-economic factors (unemployment) and the size of schools.
In the oral presentation we will describe the individual tests and its psychometric properties and discuss the contribution of the new battery to the literacy difficulties assessment field in the Czech Republic.