LAUSR

Background: Cultivating core literacy in physical education (PE) is increasingly recognized as crucial for talent development in higher education. Although diverse assessment tools exist for various literacies, none specifically evaluate the core literacy of the PE discipline among Chinese university students. This study aimed to develop and validate a scale for assessing this core literacy. Methods: An initial item pool was developed through a comprehensive literature review and in-depth expert interviews. Following three rounds of Delphi expert consultation (n = 15) and a pilot test, five items exhibiting insufficient discriminative power or conceptual redundancy were removed, yielding the final Chinese University Students’ Physical Education Core Literacy Assessment Scale. The scale was administered to 1008 university students. Its reliability and validity were examined through exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA). Results: The finalized scale contains 43 items across three dimensions. Model fit indices were excellent: χ2/df of 1.252, RMSEA of 0.016, CFI of 0.934, TLI of 0.992. Conclusion: The newly developed scale proves to be a valid and reliable instrument for measuring core PE literacy among Chinese university students.