Desarrollo, pilotaje y validación de la prueba PRAP (Prueba de Reconocimiento Automático de Palabras) en estudiantes chilenos de Kínder a tercer año básico

The current study describes the development, piloting and vali-dation procedures for PRAP, an assessment tool created to evaluate Spanish word recognition abilities in Chilean students in grades Kin-dergarten through third. The central premise of the approach is that successful silent reading comprehension at every level of text difficulty requires three abilities: word identification, language comprehension, and print processing. In the current study we describe the procedures employed to establish construct and concurrent validity for the PRAP, and show that automatic word recognition is Spanish is strongly rela-ted to reading comprehension. The use of assessment tools to monitor the development of word recognition skills with validity and reliability is extremely useful in countries such as Chile, especially because there are only a handful of Spanish word recognition assessments.