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Development and Evaluation of a Tablet-Based Reading Fluency Test for Primary School Children

Assessing children’s literacy skills is a key requirement for successful learning. However, standardized assessments are almost exclusively available as paper-and-pencil tests, discarding digital testing’s advantages. In this article, we develop and evaluate two different tablet versions for a paper-based reading fluency test for German primary school children: one true-to-original design (TDId) and a tablet-optimized design (TDOpt). We investigate the reliability, equivalence, and user experience of the tablet-based versions by comparing it to each other and to the paper-based version in a user test with 21 fourth graders. The results suggest very high reliability of both tablet-based versions (r’s >.94). Children scored significantly higher on TDId than on the other tests while reading scores assessed with TDOpt matched the conventional test. Children preferred both tablet versions over the paper-based test, whereby TDOpt was consistently rated best. This study suggests that a tablet-optimized reading fluency test not only retains test reliability but is also more appealing to primary school children.