Early Reading First as a Model for Improving Preschool Literacy Instruction and Outcomes

Supporting Emergent Writing in Preschool Classrooms: Results of a Professional Development Program

“…This is unfortunate, as two other research groups have found that a second year led to further improvements in interaction quality and/or stronger effects on child outcomes [48,68,69]. Closer inspection of our own results on a year-by-year basis found continued growth in classroom quality, implementation fidelity, and child outcomes with each successive year [51]. With multi-year programs, teachers can circle back to earlier content and address issues at a more sophisticated level [68], and this is exactly what we did in our workshop agendas.…”

“…Intervention classrooms used Learning Connections as a supplement to the baseline Creative Curriculum required by their Head Start agency. Learning Connections is a research-based, skills-focused curriculum that addresses the domains of oral language, phonological and phonemic awareness, alphabet knowledge and print concepts, and emergent writing [51,52]. A teacher's manual included over 140 developmentally sequenced activities and guidance on how to modify each activity to make it more or less challenging [53].…”