Assessing Early Literacy Growth in Preschoolers Using Individual Growth and Development Indicators

Abstract

Evidence of longitudinal relations between language and early literacy skills in early childhood and later reading (and other) achievement is growing, along with an expanding array of early education programs designed to improve later academic outcomes and prevent, reduce, or close later academic achievement gaps across groups. Assessment systems to support this intervention have been developed, but to date we have little evidence of these systems’ outcomes when used at a broad scale in community-based preschool programs. For this broad purpose, two research questions were addressed: (a) How much progress do children make on language and early literacy skills over the course of one school year? and (b) What is the relationship between child characteristics, baseline performance, and growth on language and early literacy skills? Results indicated growth over time for all measures and relations between child age, gender, and free-or-reduced-price status and students’ performance at the beginning of the school year, but (with one exception) no relation between these covariates and growth over time. Discussion centers on current status of language and early literacy assessment in early childhood education as well as needs and issues to be addressed in future research and program development.

Early childhood language gains, kindergarten readiness, and Grade 3 reading achievement

“…Most research that has examined language gains (1) considered these gains as the outcome of interest, such as intervention studies or correlational studies of associations between classroom quality or language practices and language learning (e.g., Burchinal et al, 2021;Hadley et al, 2022;Herrera et al, 2021;Rogde et al, 2019); (2) examined longitudinal associations between gains in one aspect of language and other language outcomes (e.g., Donnelly & Kidd, 2021;Rowe et al, 2012); or (3) described children's language gains over time (e.g., Kincaid et al, 2020;Schmitt et al, 2017). To our knowledge, studies examining language change as a predictor of other longitudinal outcomes are very limited; we are aware of a few studies examining this within the area of socioemotional development (e.g., Petersen & LeBeau, 2021) and two studies that used latent change scores (LCSs) to examine bidirectional associations between change in vocabulary and change in reading comprehension in samples of elementary school students (Quinn et al, 2015(Quinn et al, , 2020.…”

Portuguese Early Literacy Screening Tool- RaLEPE: Pilot Study

“…The early detection and intervention may decrease the number of young children with difficulties in the future. Moreover, assessment systems that support these efforts are increasingly important because can be indicators of the developmental difficulties that may affect emotional and social outcomes for an individual across their life span (Fricke et al, 2017;Haley et al, 2017;Kincaid, McConnell & Wackerle-Hollman, 2020;Rogde, Melby-Lervåg, & Lervåg, 2016).…”

Meeting in the Middle: Future Directions for Researchers to Support Educators' Assessment Literacy and Data-Based Decision Making

“…With increased demands on educators' time, implementing strategies that are easy to use, fast to implement, and result in desired student outcomes is imperative. Recently, researchers have focused on incorporating technology into DBDM (e.g., cloud-based systems: Buzhardt et al, 2010; Johnson, 2017 and app-based: Kincaid et al, 2018).…”