Abstract

As an educational process specific to higher education, academic literacy benefits from the use of an appropriate diagnostic tool, as this enables the level of students' communication skills to be identified at the start of the teaching and learning process. This article presents the design, development, implementation and analysis of the results of an original diagnostic tool called LecDis-S (short for "disciplinary reading in health"), which aimed to assess the reading proficiency of health degree students entering a Chilean university using stimulus texts relating to human anatomy. Quantitative analysis yielded the following results: the assessed population had difficulty correctly answering questions relating to literal reading (textual dimension), particularly those concerning sentence comprehension. In contrast, the pragmatic and critical dimensions (assessing factors such as the context of text circulation and the speaker's stance) demonstrated a higher level of achievement, despite the instrument's high overall difficulty. This evaluation allows us to conclude that LecDis-S constitutes a preliminary diagnostic test of academic disciplinary reading competence in first-year health students. However, the overall internal consistency of the total score was modest, so the instrument should not be presented as fully validated or used to inform high-stakes individual decisions. In its current state, its main utility is to support group assessments and identify areas of reading difficulty at the start of training, particularly given that it is constructed using authentic texts from a specific discipline.