Construct Validity of a Short Test of Pre-writing to Preschoolers

Abstract

The objective of this research is to evaluate psychometrically the properties of an instrument to describe the pre-writing skill level, PE-56 (Condemarín & Chadwick, 1991). The sample was composed of 77 preschool children of about 5 years old. The Scoring System was modified by an adaptation of the Global Scoring System Bender-II. PE-56 was applied in small groups, and internal structure, reliability and relationships with external criteria (Bender-II and VMI-4) were analyzed. Good reliability (0.82) and an underlying unidimensional model of the items were found, but with error covariance between two items; the correlation with visual-motor tests was different according to the scoring method in these measures, obtaining different correlations between performance of pre-writing test and visual-motor tests. The use and limits of the instrument are discussed.