Adaptation of the Reading Maturity Survey for College Level Students to Turkish: Instrument and Construct Validation Study

Abstract

This study aims to adapt the Reading Maturity Survey (RMS) developed by Thomas, Yao, Katherine, and Kreiner (2018) into Turkish to determine the reading maturity level of university students. The study group of the research consisted of 734 students studying at the university level. In the first phase of the adaptation study, three experts working in the Department of English Language Teaching and a total of 126 university students with sufficient command of both languages were worked with, and language validity practices were completed. After the Turkish language validity was established, Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) and Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) were performed to determine the scale’s construct validity. To determine the reliability of the items in the scale, the Cronbach α internal reliability coefficients were calculated. To determine the distinctiveness of the items, the item-total correlations were calculated, and the significance of the difference between the item scores of the upper 27% and lower 27% groups determined according to the total score was determined by the t-test. The study’s findings show that the Turkish version of the RMS is a valid and reliable measurement tool to determine the reading maturity levels of Turkish university students.