Measuring Early Spanish Literacy: Factor Structure and Measurement Invariance of the 'Phonological Awareness Literacy Screening for Kindergarteners' in Spanish ('PALS español K')

We investigated the latent factor structure of the "Phonological Awareness Literacy Screening for Kindergarteners" in Spanish ("PALS español K"). Participants included 590 Spanish-speaking, public-school kindergarteners from five states. Three theoretically-guided factor structures were measured and tested with one half of our sample using confirmatory factor analytic (CFA) methods. We then replicated the best fitting model with the second half of our sample and used multigroup CFA (MGCFA) to test for the model's configural and metric invariance. MGCFA revealed that PALS español K exhibited measurement invariance when comparing populations of boys and girls. Our results support the educational utility of PALS español K as a tool for assessing important reading constructs and informing early interventions across gender groups with Spanish-speaking students.