Cognitive and linguistic skills assessment protocol: adaptation and validation for European Portuguese

Abstract

Linguistic and Cognitive skills play an essential role in the development of communication, language and literacy. Therefore, their assessment of school children is crucial since it allows the child's cognitive and linguistic profile characterisation, according to the school year she attends. This study intended to describe the adaptation and validation process of the instrument – Cognitive and Linguistic Skills Assessment Protocol. This Protocol was adapted from a Brazilian (Portuguese) version to a European Portuguese version to evaluate the cognitive-linguistic skills of school children (1st to 5th grade). It consists of two versions, the collective version and the individual version. The collective version consists of writing, arithmetic, auditory processing and visual processing skills; the individual version consists of reading, metalinguistic, auditory processing, visual processing and processing speed skills. After adapting the linguistic aspects (morphosyntactic and semantic), a pilot study was carried out to verify whether the instrument was well-adapted and easy to understand for the study’s target population. The sample consisted of a class for each school year, excluding children with special educational needs or intellectual/auditory deficits. A total of 75 children were evaluated: 12 children of the 1st grade; 18 of the 2nd grade; 15 of the 3rd grade; 15 of the 4th grade; and 15 of the 5th grade. The results showed that the protocol was, in general, well adapted. The instrument was then applied to a larger sample (2 classes per school year) in a total of 157 children (without special educational needs or intellectual/auditory deficits), and the data were processed in the statistical program IBM SPSS. In general, the mean values were the expected ones in all subtests of the Protocol Collective Version and some tests of the Individual Version, from the 1st to the 4th grade, but not the 5th grade, which showed non-expected mean values. This work provided the possibility for developing the subsequent phase of the study, where percentiles will be calculated to obtain the standard/normalised values to classify children’s performance as standard, above average or lower than expected.