Learners Cognitive Skills Test: A Culturally Relevant Assessment Development and Validation for Early Childhood Education

Abstract

Background: Recognition of cognitive abilities among young learners should be done early in life so that school preparation and specific intervention can be enhanced. Nevertheless, most of the available evaluation instruments are imported and might not be culturally fit in the environment of Pakistani students and societies.
Purpose: This research was selected to create and test the Learners Cognitive Skills Test; LCST, which is a culturally competent tool to measure attention, perception, memory, learning language, and problem solving in young learners.
Procedure: LCST was used in 70 children aged between 9 and 10 years; they were in a government school. The contents of the test were based on the SNC to meet the objectives of this study. Validity was achieved by reviewing of SLOs by experts and giving weight to the SLOs and the content. The content validity index and ratio were used to assess construct validity basing on expert ratings. Further evaluation of content validity was done by conducting item analysis, such as item difficulty,  discrimination index and point-biseral Pearson correlation. The reliability was established by test retest stability and internal consistency and Cronbach alpha was taken to be reliability coefficient. Findings: The LCST showed good content validity (CVI = 0.848) and five factor frameworks in accordance with the desired cognitive abilities. Out of the 50 items, item-37 expressed the highest point-biserial correlation and significantly predicted overall performance in simple regression (p value = .001) hence represented best as an item. The test-retest reliability was also a high internal consistency (Cronbach alpha = 0.86).
Conclusion: LCST is a psycho-metrically sound and culturally suitable instrument that can measure the cognitive abilities of young learners in the governmental sector. Its application can be utilized in teaching planning, early interventions and developmental tracking over time