Analysis of the internal structure of IBALEC

Abstract The Instrument for Brief Assessment of Reading, Writing, and Comprehension (IBALEC) aims to assess the performance of public school students in the mastery of basic literacy skills. After content validation, based on the analysis of a group of specialists, the IBALEC was applied individually to 825 students (439 boys and 386 girls) from the 1st to the 5th year of Elementary Education in two public schools, to analyze its internal structure. The factorial analyses performed demonstrated a good fit of the instrument to an internal structure model composed of five correlated factors, corresponding to the theoretical constructs that subsidized its construction: word reading, word writing, sentence writing, sentence reading comprehension, and reading/understanding text. These results are strong evidence of the construct validity of IBALEC, to assess the proposed skills.