Abstract:

Evaluations of children’s school readiness and their implication have become popular and even compulsory in some countries of Europe. The school readiness assessment or Diagnostic Assessment Systems for Development (DIFER) was widely used to predict children’s readiness for school and to assess their performance in the primary grades (Nagy et al., 2016; Józsa et al., 2022). One important consideration when using the DIFER test is to ensure that the test is measuring the same construct across groups of children, such as genders, ethnicities, and contexts. This is known as measurement invariance (MI), and failure to establish invariance can lead to biased test results and inaccurate conclusions (Kim et al., 2022). Additionally, the latent mean difference (LMD) is also a way to account for potential measurement differences and obtain a more accurate estimate of the true difference in the underlying construct between two groups (Tsaousis & Alghamdi, 2022). This study, therefore, aimed to investigate the psychometric properties such as MI and LMD of the social skills scale (SS, 20 items) of the DIFER test for Hungarian preschool children’s school readiness assessment. We recruited a large sample (3149) of Hungarian preschool children (Hungarian children who live in Hungary, and Hungarian children who live in Slovakia). In our study, a powerful technique, Multi-Group Confirmatory Factor Analysis (MG-CFA), was applied to assess the degree of MI and LMD of the SS test across different groups of gender and context (country), and identify sources of measurement bias. In the MI analysis, four different levels of MI (configural, metric, scalar, and residual) were assessed for the SS test. The findings showed that the SS configural model (that inquires whether or not equal factor structures across groups) approved the invariance of the factor structure of children’s school readiness measurement model across groups of gender and context. In the assessment of the SS metric invariance (investigating whether or not equal factor loadings across groups), it was found that the strength of the relationship between each item and the underlying construct of the SS test were good enough across groups of gender and context. Assessing the invariance of intercepts (scalar invariance), the means of observed variables (the level of the construct being measured from the SS test) are equal across all groups of gender and context when the item score is zero. In our final level of measurement invariance, we also assessed the variability of observed variables that are not counted for by the latent factors in the model (residual invariance). It provided the same variability or measurement error in the test items across different groups of gender and context. In examining the LMD of the SS test, Hungarian preschool children (who live in Hungary) reported significantly higher than those who live in Slovakia for their school readiness. Findings proved that this paper on MI and LMD of the SS test implies the reliability and consistency across different groups of Hungarian preschool children. This means that the test is not biased towards any particular group and can accurately measure the knowledge or skills of all participants. Additionally, the findings suggest that the SS test is a valid measure of the construct of children’s school readiness and that it can be used with confidence in research and practical applications.

Keywords:

School readiness assessment, social skills, measurement invariance, latent mean difference, preschool children.