DEVELOPMENT OF A LOCALLY APPROPRIATE INSTRUMENT TO MEASURE CHILDREN’S READINESS FOR SCHOOL

Abstract

There is an achievement gap occurring in standard one of primary education, between children who attend pre-schools and those that do not. Many children are not prepared for the minimal standards needed to succeed in primary school and, as a result, the gap widens throughout schooling. Children’s readiness for school is an important attribute for future success among all children. The purpose of this study was to develop a culturally appropriate instrument that will be used to measure children’s readiness for school. Specifically, the focus was the use of the Malawi Early Learning Development Standards to generate items in the six developmental domains. The study consisted of 12 CBCCs, 25 caregivers and 303 children enrolled in the CBCCs and who were 5 years at the time of assessment. On appropriateness of the instrument, the study examined the reliability and validity of the whole instrument and items in the instrument. The study also focused on clustering items and reducing the number of items by using factor analysis method. High values (>0.7) of𝒂 and 𝒓 were obtained. Items have been reduced from 88 to 56, of which the 56 items are able to explain about 60% of what the 88 items do. The instrument provides an opportunity for thorough assessment of children holistically. The instrument is an easy to use and interpret tool, which will assist caregivers whom most are illiterate, to intervene on developmental areas children are lacking behind. This will in turn improve transition of children to primary education and broadly improve quality of primary education by reducing dropout and repetition rates which are highly attributed to low levels of children readiness for school.