Face validity of the Arabic letters writing assessment instrument for children.

Abstract

Historically, Arabic writing was used to spread Islam in Malaysia. Nowadays, Arabic writing has become a part of Malaysia’s national curriculum under Islamic studies subject. Previous studies have shown that many students in school are still having difficulties to master Arabic learning, especially in writing. These scenarios were claimed to be caused by poor teaching skills and also the lack of proper assessment to assess and evaluate Arabic handwriting performance. Hence, there is an urge to find a trustworthy instrument to assess Arabic handwriting, especially among children in early childhood education. Therefore, this study aimed to test the face validity of a newly developed questionnaire for Arabic writing assessment. Face validity assessment was chosen to get the first layer of experts’ review and evaluation on the items constructed in the assessment instrument. A questionnaire using 5-point Likert scale was distributed to 28 experts in Arabic handwriting at different levels of education. The results show that most of the items in the questionnaire are valid to be used to assess children as all experts agreed on the items developed. This is the first pilot study thatensures the basic structure in developing appropriate items in the instrument is good. The results could be used as a verification to support the validation of using this new instrument to assess students’ Arabic handwriting performance.