Performance of first-year Mexican students in a reading test based on a psycholinguistic model

Abstract

The development of reading skills in the academic career has become one of the fundamental axes in the support that universities offer to their first-year students. To this end, multiple assessments have been designed that comply with the requirements of higher education institutions. Therefore, it is essential that the instrument is based on cognitive and linguistic principles and, in addition, complies with the principles of reliability and validity. In the case of this research, a reading test was designed based on the psycholinguistic model of Riffo and Véliz (1993), which was applied to 223 students from the Universidad del Valle de Atemajac (UNIVA), La Piedad campus, in order to test the reliability and validity of the instrument. The results of the statistical analysis indicate that the test has an acceptable reliability for instruments of the nature of a reading test. Furthermore, no significant differences in performance were observed between the different groups of students, so it is possible to postulate that the test is valid for evaluating general reading skills at the beginning of higher education.