Urdu Achievement Test Norms: Implications for Identifying Learning and Emotional Risks for Grade 3 Students

Tayyaba Sabir; Saima  Dawood

doi:10.32350/ccpr.62.03

Tayyaba Sabir Centre for Clinical Psychology, University of the Punjab, Lahore, Pakistan
Saima Dawood Centre for Clinical Psychology, University of the Punjab, Lahore, Pakistan

DOI: https://doi.org/10.32350/ccpr.62.03

Keywords: Grade-3 Students, Urdu Achievement Test, Norms Development

Abstract

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The present study aimed to develop the norms of Achievement Test of Urdu reading and writing in a private school for Grade 3 in Lahore, Pakistan. Previously, norms of the Urdu Achievement Test were not developed so efforts were made to develop the normative scores to make the test useable in the future. The test included all the elements of reading and writing in order to assess the achievement of a child. It consists of 389 items and has 10 subscales. The seven subscales used to measure the reading ability of students include Letter Word Identification, Word Attack, Reading Comprehension, Receptive Coding, Syllables, Phonemes, and Quick Reading. Moreover, the other three subtests were used to evaluate Urdu writing of students which included Writing Alphabets, Dictation and Proofing. Scoring was based on 1 and 0 points. A descriptive research design was employed using Purposive Sampling to collect data. The test was administered on a sample size of 200 students (100 girls & 100 boys). A private school from Lahore, Pakistan was selected for this purpose. The first phase of data collection was the screening phase in which Slosson Intelligence Test and Colored Progressive Matrices were used to screen out the below averaged students. After measuring their IQ, Urdu Achievement Test was administered to evaluate their current understanding about Urdu Language. After data collection, the data was entered in SPSS software. The mean, standard deviation, percentiles and independent sample t-test were calculated for the development of norms. Norms provided a way to evaluate the participant’s performance by comparing it to the broader, representative sample. The results revealed that the girls outperformed boys in Urdu Achievement Test. The research will assist professionals in screening and identifying the learning difficulties among students in specific areas.

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