Psychometric Prosperity Of Early Childhood Numeracy Sub-Scale In MELQO

Background: Numeracy in early childhood can significantly positively predict children's academic performance and career success in the future,measurement of numeracy in early childhood has many benefits on scientific research and education practice.Accurate measurement of numeracy in early childhood depends on a good reliability and validity of measurement tools,scales published at home and abroad to measure mathematics ability in early childhood are less and some scale are difficult to obtain.MELQO(Measuring Early Learning Quality and Outcomes)Direct Assessment is released in 2014 by brooking institute,which include the United Nations children's fund,the United Nations educational,Scientific and Cultural organization and the World Bank is a set of tools measuring learning quality and outcomes of children aged 3-8 years old.Numeracy scale is a subscale of MELQO Direct Assessment,the scale is open source and free,convenient for the researchers to obtain.Up to now,the psychometric properties of this scale are not clear in China.The purpose of this study is to analyze the psychometric properties of the numeracy scale of MELQO Direct Assessment in China based on item response theory.Methods: The test was performed among 334 children in a eastern province of China.The psychometric properties of the scale were analyzed based on Item Response Theory.Results:(1)The two parameter logistic model fits well with Chinese children's data compared with the 1PL model and the 3PL model;(2)All difficulty parameters of items fall in the interval(-4,0),the minimum value of difficulty parameter is-3.07,the maximum value of difficulty parameter is-0.27,the average value of difficulty parameter is-1.32,and the standard deviation of difficulty parameter is 0.75.The easiest item is 10 d of the spatial vocabulary test,and the most difficult item is 12 c item of Producing A Set test.The minimum value and maximum value of the discrimination parameters of each item are 0.77,8.62,the average value of discrimination parameters is 2.56,the standard deviation of discrimination parameters is 1.79.The item with the least discrimination is 16 c of Mental Transformation test,and the item with the largest discrimination parameters is 13 i of Number Identification test;(3)Most of the items in the numeracy test of MELQO Direct Assessment can provide good information for most children in the ability scale,such as Verbal counting,Producing A Set,Number Comparison,Simple Addition and so on.However,the items of the Receptive Spatial Vocabulary and Mental Transformation items provide less information;(4)The numeracy test of MELQO Direct Assessment can provide good information when children's latent ability fall in the interval(-2.56,0.08),and the numeracy test has a good reliability in the framework of item response theory when children's latent ability fall in the interval(-2.56,0.08).Conclusion:(1)Most difficulty parameters of items are small,some discrimination parameters of items are large such as items of Number Identification test;(2)Most items in the numeracy test of MELQO Direct Assessment can provide good information,however items of Spatial Vocabulary and Spatial Transformation tests provide less information;(3)The numeracy scale of MELQO Direct Assessment is more suitable for testing children with low latent trait,such as children in small classes;(4)items of Receptive Spatial Vocabulary test and Mental Transformation in the scale can be adapted by increasing the difficulty of items appropriately.