Riflettere sulle parole: la formazione delle parole nelle prove Invalsi

The present study examines the word formation tasks administered in the language awareness section of the Invalsi tests, starting from 2008, the first year when the tests were administered, up to 2019. The objective of this revision is to gain a deeper understanding of 1) which word formation processes (e.g., derivation, composition, conversion, etc.) are put under scrutiny in the tasks; 2) how the tasks are distributed between school levels and levels of difficulty; 3) which variables affect task difficulty; 4) if the test results allow for the identification of a progression of topics, from the easiest to the most difficult. The analyses reveal that most of the tasks investigate the process of derivation and that their difficulty is influenced by the interaction of several variables. The most salient variables are the complexity of the task (number of words to analyse and the format), the degree of abstraction required by the question and the frequency of the words to analyse.