Although Arabic is an official language in 27 countries, standardized measures to assess Arabic literacy are scarce. The purpose of this research was to examine the item functioning of an assessment of Arabic orthographic knowledge. Sixty novel items were piloted with 201 third grade Arabic-speaking students. Participants were asked to identify the correctly spelled word from a pair of two words. Although the assessment was designed to be unidimensional, competing models were tested to determine whether item performance was attributable to multidimensionality. No multidimensional structure fit the data significantly better than the unidimensional model. The 60 original items were evaluated through item fit statistics and comparing performance against theoretical expectations. Twenty-eight items were identified as functioning poorly and were iteratively removed from the scale, resulting in a 32-item set. A value of 0.987 was obtained for McDonald’s coefficient ω from this final scale. Participants’ scores on the measure correlated with an external word reading accuracy measure at 0.79 (p < .001), suggesting that the tool may measure skills important to word reading in Arabic. The task is simple to score and can discriminate among children with below-average orthographic knowledge. This work provides a foundation to develop Arabic literacy assessments.

中文翻译：

---

阿拉伯语正字法知识测量的发展：心理测量评估

尽管阿拉伯语是 27 个国家的官方语言，但评估阿拉伯语识字率的标准化措施却很少。本研究的目的是检查对阿拉伯语拼写知识评估的项目功能。在 201 名三年级阿拉伯语学生中试行了 60 种小说项目。参与者被要求从一对两个单词中识别出正确拼写的单词。尽管评估设计为单维的，但对竞争模型进行了测试以确定项目绩效是否可归因于多维。没有多维结构比一维模型更适合数据。60 个原始项目通过项目拟合统计数据进行评估，并将性能与理论预期进行比较。28 个项目被确定为功能不佳，并从量表中反复删除，从而形成 32 个项目集。从这个最终量表中获得的麦当劳系数 ω 值为 0.987。参与者在该测量上的得分与外部单词阅读准确度测量相关，为 0.79 (p< .001)，表明该工具可以衡量对阿拉伯语单词阅读很重要的技能。该任务很容易评分，并且可以区分拼写知识低于平均水平的儿童。这项工作为开展阿拉伯语识字评估奠定了基础。