Monitoring oral language development in young children: psychometric evaluation of a learning progress assessment

Introduction Learning Progress Assessments (LPA) are widely used to monitor individual progress in various domains, enabling the continuous adjustment of interventions as needed. Although LPAs are well-established in areas such as reading and mathematics, there is a lack of tools specifically designed to assess oral language development and in early childhood education. To address this gap, two studies were conducted to provide initial evidence for the psychometric properties of a newly developed LPA. This tool aims to assess progress in oral language development in monolingual and multilingual kindergarten children aged 4–6 years. Methods Since progress assessments rely on the use of multiple test versions, 11 parallel tests were developed based on the sentence repetition task. In the first study, a cross-sectional design was used, where 87 children completed the parallel tests within 2 weeks. In the second study, a longitudinal design was applied, involving 88 children who completed the parallel tests at 4-week intervals over a period of 6 months. Results and Discussion The results from the studies indicated that the parallel tests had similar levels of difficulty and provided reliable and valid global measures of children's language abilities. Confirmatory factor analyses supported the LPA's one-dimensional structure. Moreover, repeated-measures analyses and a latent growth curve model provide initial evidence of the LPA's sensitivity to change, particularly for children with lower initial language abilities.