Associations between young children’s 
print fixations during book reading and 
their early literacy skills

Abstract

In the current study, the potentially causal association between young children’s fixations on print and their early literacy ability was explored. The primary purpose was to determine the potentially reciprocal relations between print fixations and literacy abilities, such that print fixations and early literacy skills reciprocally enhance one another rather than one having a direct effect on the other (e.g., fixation on print leads to improvement in early literacy skills). Visual fixations on print for 95 Chinese children ranging in age from 4 to 6 years were recorded using an eye tracker, and their early literacy abilities (vocabulary, orthographic awareness and reading ability) were concurrently examined. Results of structural equation models designed to test different pathways through which print fixations and early literacy skills are related revealed that the reciprocal relationship between print fixations and early literacy skills was not supported, and that fixations on print seem to have a direct effect on children’s literacy skills.

Development and validation of assessment tools for literacy and numeracy skills in early childhood education

“…To present accurate content validation, an analysis of scientific literature was carried out that reflects the actuality of research that has addressed the problem of this study from the start, with a focus on collecting data from various instruments for early childhood literacy (Bergman et al, 2021;Konishi et al, 2018;Korat et al, 2017;Liu et al, 2020;Lonigan et al, 2017;Markussen-Brown et al, 2017;Sampa et al, 2018;Scull et al, 2021;Wackerle-Hollman et al, 2020;Wirth et al, 2020;Xu et al, 2017) and various instruments for numeracy (Hellstrand et al, 2020;Korat et al, 2017;LeFevre et al, 2018;McLeod et al, 2019;Niklas and Tayler, 2018;Purpura and Lonigan, 2013;Raghubar and Barnes, 2017;Thomas et al, 2023;Wästerlid, 2022;Yang et al, 2021).…”

“…We used EFA to examine the factors underlying different task structures based on theoretical considerations. For literacy, the instrument was designed to test a twofactor model (expressive and receptive skills), but the analysis revealed three factors: expressive skills (Bergman et al, 2021;Konishi et al, 2018;Sampa et al, 2018), receptive skills (Liu et al, 2020;Markussen-Brown et al, 2017), and pre-reading skills such as letter knowledge, narrative skills, print awareness, and phonological awareness (Pan et al, 2017).…”