Development and Validation of a Representational Fluency Test for Primary School Students

Abstract

As part of a multi-year project that aims to develop digital learning environment offering adaptive remedial interventions for primary level students, we present the design of a new instrument that tests the representational fluency of primary school students. Representational fluency refers to learners' ability to reason and work among multiple representations. In this article, we identify the competences that the Representational Fluency Test (RFT) has to cover, in the light of literature, local curriculum, previous national exams, and discussions with educators. Next, we design the questions of the test following these competences. In addition, we report a pilot study that we administered to test and validate the RFT. We present the results of the pilot study and also discuss the next stages of our project that include testing and using our proposed RFT. The long-term goal of our project is to develop an intelligent system that provides remedial interventions customized for each student with representational fluency difficulties. We expect that our work can contribute toward a more personalized education at the primary school level.