Abstract:
The Pre-IPT - Spanish was developed to assess the oral Spanish language proficiency of pre-school children whose first language is Spanish. It was developed along the same lines as the English version of the test, and may be used with children who are 3, 4, and 5 years of age. The test covers four basic areas of oral language proficiency: Vocabulary, Comprehension, Syntax, and Verbal Expression. As the administration of the test progresses, children advance through as many of five levels as they can before reaching the ceiling of their proficiency. The Pre-IPT-Spanish is administered individually and generally takes about 8 minutes. Ideally, it should Ba. administered by a professional educator who is strongly bilingual. Testing involves a display of story pieces on a board. These pieces include a family, some pets, a picnic table, trees, birthday presents, etc. The examiner arranges the pieces in several different ways and asks the child a series of scripted questions about them. The child's answers are recorded as "correct" or "incorrect" on an answer sheet by the examiner. The test materials include a "Level Summary" sheet that describes the skills a child would have at each level, and which is suitable for reporting to parents. Norms were established on 312 pre-school children in California and Texas. Between-Forms reliability was estimated at .72, and Guttman Split-Half reliability was .78. The Spearman-Brown Equal Length coefficient was .84. For Part I, Alpha was .83 and for Part II, .91. Information about estimates of validity are found in the technical manual which is not part of the EAC East collection.