The Construction and Validation of a Hong Kong Graded Chinese Character Identification Test (HKGCCIT) for Primary School Children

Background: Word identification is increasingly recognized to be a prerequisite for each child to acquire knowledge and culture in a colorful reading world. A valid assessment of a child's word identification is very important for literacy instruction and evaluation. It also helps identifying children with literacy difficulties at an early stage because word identification is an important indicator of literacy difficulties. Existing measures of Chinese character identification are with limitations in several aspects. For example, some scales are designed for primary school children of low grades only. Also, most of the scales are of restricted use and can only be administered by professional educational psychologists or speech therapists. There has not been one standardized Chinese character identification scale with local norms for the use of Hong Kong primary school teachers. The present research attempted to construct a standardized Chinese character identification scale with local norms for primary school children based on a database of Hong Kong Chinese primary school texts. The Hong Kong Graded Chinese Character Identification Test (HKGCCIT) will offer teachers an assessment tool to assess the word recognition level of their students. The assessment result will help teachers identify at-risk readers and plan for instruction and remediation.;Methods and Results: There were five phases in the development of the HKGCCIT.;In the first phase, a database of 3033 Chinese characters was constructed based on six widely used primary texts in Hong Kong. Difficulty level of each character was determined through a series of procedures. The numbers of characters in each grade were 530, 646, 686, 563, 389, and 219 respectively.;In the second phase, the graded-characters were divided into 14 forms and were tried out with primary school children in several schools. It was found that the number of character successfully recognized by half of the tested students in each grade was 311, 423, 437, 337, 206 and 115, respectively.;The third phase was the construction phase of the HKGCCIT. First, we divided the database into six sub-databases and determined the difficulty level (L1-L5) of each character in the corresponding grade based on the passing rate. To ensure within-grade and between-grade difficulty levels of the selected characters, we separately randomly sampled 20 characters from L3 (passing rate: 40%-60%) and L4 (passing rate: 20%-40%) in the six sub-databases. In addition, we selected 10 characters from L2 in the grade-one sub-database and 20 characters from L5 in the grade-six sub-database. Thus, the HKGCCIT, with two parallel forms, was constructed as a graded scale with 150 characters and eight difficulty levels in total. Additionally, two forms of a reading fluency test with 200 characters were also developed to measure character reading fluency for six grades in this phase.;In the formal testing phase (i.e., phase 4), letters were sent to more than 100 schools for participation in the current study. Twelve schools from three bandings were selected to join the study. A total of 2056 students from grade-one to grade-six were tested. Two forms of the HKGCCIT and related validity measurements (i.e., two forms of reading fluency test, Taiwan Chinese Character Recognition Test) were administered. The results showed that: (1) The HKGCCIT had high internal consistency reliability coefficient (alpha=.98). (2) Grade and age development norms were constructed and the related percentile conversion tables and standardized-score conversion tables were created. (3) Item analysis based on classic testing theory and item response theory suggested that the HKGCCIT has moderate difficulty. Comparing with the Taiwan Chinese Character Recognition Test developed by Huang (2001), HKGCCIT has better fit on character frequency distribution, passing rate and IRT difficulty parameters. (4) It is an effective indicator of a child's word identification achievement level and is highly correlated with the child's Chinese language achievement in school.;In the validation phase (i.e., phase 5), some students with reading difficulties and average students from another study were tested by the HKGCCIT. The results showed that two groups with different reading levels demonstrated significant difference on the HKGCCIT. More importantly, we found that the norm of the HKGCCIT, in comparison to the Taiwan Chinese Character Recognition Test provides more accurate reference scores for Hong Kong students.;Conclusion: The HKCCIT, developed on the basis of a corpus of Hong Kong Chinese primary school texts, is a reliable and valid assessment tool of Chinese character identification achievement of Hong Kong primary school children. Local norms from grade-one to grade-six were established. It should be an easy assessment tool to identify at-risk readers and plan for instruction and remediation.;Key words&...