Abstract

This article reports the results of a pilot study aimed at determining the discriminant power of seven tasks to assess syntactic awareness in first and second-cycle elementary school students. The participants were 39 students from 2nd to 8th grade at a private-subsidized school. The outcomes show that four of the seven tests can detect statistically significant variations in students' performance in syntactic awareness tasks, which makes it possible to describe a specific developmental pattern of metasyntactic skills at the analyzed school levels. These results provide relevant information on the usefulness of some tests over others to adequately evaluate syntactic awareness in schoolchildren. At the same time, they reveal methodological aspects that should be considered when assessing syntactic awareness. Finally, the methodological and educational implications that derive from this study are discussed.