Qualitative Grading Standard for Chinese Children’s Books

Subjects: Psychology >> Educational Psychology submitted time 2023-01-03

Yan Li Zinan Guo Haomin Wu Wen Guo Jia Liu

Abstract：

Elementary school students are at a critical stage of learning to read, and their language abilityand cognitive development require a large amount of reading materials that are appropriately difficult andconducive to comprehension. Current leveled reading mainly relies on shallow and quantitative text indicators, such as characters, words, and sentence level lexical properties, which is less suitable for thecharacteristics of Chinese ideographs and children's cognitive development needs. This study first usedmeta-analysis to glean eight qualitative cognitive indicators, including genre, theme, character, storyline, language feature, text structure, background knowledge, and life experience. Then we used the SOLOtaxonomy to develop a standardized grading description for each indicator that satisfied the developmental stages of children’s cognitive ability. Finally, we constructed the Qualitative Grading Standard for ChineseChildren’s Books and its operation manual. The follow-up empirical study showed that the qualitativeindicators had high discriminability, raters’ consistency reliability and predictive validity, and thus couldbeused to evaluate children’s books in an objective, reliable and valid way. In short, our Standard will helpschool teachers, book editors, and parents determine the appropriate grade level for children's books anduse Chinese leveled reading to promote children's language and cognitive development so that theycanachieve independent reading as early as possible.

Peer Review Status： Commenting Commenting Dispute

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