Exploring the dimensionality of kindergarten written composition
- PDF / 1,100,650 Bytes
- 30 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
- 52 Downloads / 210 Views
Exploring the dimensionality of kindergarten written composition Cynthia Puranik1 · Molly Duncan1 · Hongli Li1 · Guo Ying2
© Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract Despite increasing pressure for children to learn to write at younger ages, there are many unanswered questions about composition skills in early elementary school. The goal of this research was to examine the dimensionality of composition skills in kindergarten children, thereby adding to current knowledge about the measurement of young children’s writing and its component skills. The writing of 282 kindergarten children were assessed using three different scoring methods. Confirmatory factor analyses were used to investigate the dimensionality of various methods of scoring. Results indicated that a qualitative scoring system and a productivity scoring system capture distinct dimensions of kindergartners’ compositions. A scoring system for curriculum-based measurement could not attain acceptable fit, which may suggest that CBM is ill-suited for capturing the important components of composition for kindergartners. This study indicated that the measurement and components of composition in kindergarten may be qualitatively different from the compositions of older children. Keywords Component skills · Confirmatory factor analysis · Dimensionality of writing · Early writing · Kindergarten · Writing assessment
Introduction The measurement of composition skills has grown increasingly important for educators and researchers due to pressure for children to write at young ages and an increased emphasis on data-driven decision making in the classroom. Despite the important role of writing in academic learning, there are still many open questions and a lack of consensus about how best to measure young children’s * Cynthia Puranik [email protected] 1
Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, Georgia State University, Ste 850, 30 Pryor St. SW, Atlanta, GA 30303, USA
2
University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, USA
13
Vol.:(0123456789)
C. Puranik et al.
composition. Composition refers to children’s ability to generate ideas for what to write and compose phrases, sentences, or texts in their writing using conventional or invented spelling. One important issue revolves around how to best capture children’s written output, or in other words, what components of written composition are important. Some studies have reported or assumed that young children’s composition is accurately represented as a single, holistic component or score (e.g., Abbott & Berninger, 1993; Gansle, VanDerHeyden, Noell, Resetar, & Williams, 2006), whereas others have found that the writing of elementary school students contains many components, including macro-organization, productivity, complexity, and accuracy (Hall-Mills & Apel, 2015; Kim, Al Otaiba, Folsom, Greulich, & Puranik, 2014, Kim, Al Otaiba, Wanzek, & Gatlin, 2015; Puranik, Lombardino, & Altmann, 2008; Wagner et al., 2011). A second issue is what type of measurement best captures these important components of writing.
Data Loading...
