Profiles of emergent literacy skills among preschool children who are at risk for academic difficulties☆
Section snippets
Theoretical model of emergent literacy
The term emergent literacy connotes the understanding that children's reading, writing, and oral language develop in an interdependent fashion in the years prior to formal reading and writing instruction, and that emergent literacy skills serve as precursors to skilled and fluent reading (Whitehurst & Lonigan, 1998). For the present study, we adopted a model specified by Whitehurst and colleagues (Storch and Whitehurst, 2002, Whitehurst and Lonigan, 1998, Whitehurst and Lonigan, 2001) proposing
Emergent literacy development among preschoolers from low-SES backgrounds
Children from low-SES backgrounds tend to perform more poorly across both domains of emergent literacy skills than children from middle-class homes (e.g., Bowey, 1995, Justice et al., 2006, Neuman, 2006, Whitehurst, 1997). It is important to consider why children reared in poverty consistently exhibit under-developed emergent literacy skills. There are likely child-level and experiential-level reasons for the lagged emergent literacy development of children living in poverty. At a child level,
Individual differences in emergent literacy skills: person-centered approaches
Given that children may exhibit considerable individual differences in their emergent literacy performance, it seems essential to consider these skills in a multivariate, person-centered context. Person-centered approaches seek to identify subgroups within a population who share a specific characteristic or a pattern of characteristics and examine “whether development proceeds differently in these groups” (Hoff, 2006b, p. 636). Inherent in person-centered approaches is the assumption that there
Purpose of this study
In the present study, we employed a person-centered approach (i.e., cluster analysis) with a large sample of preschoolers to identify profiles in emergent literacy skills among children at risk for academic problems. This procedure allowed us to account for the heterogeneous nature of emergent literacy skills and identify homogeneous subgroups that displayed similar patterns of strengths and weaknesses across these variables. Specifically, the aims of the present study were two-fold: (a) to
Participants
Participants were 492 preschool-aged children (241 boys, 251 girls) taking part in two larger multiyear studies of emergent literacy development in a single mid-Atlantic state. Data were collected for two sequential cohorts of children (total N = 646) over a two-year period. In the larger studies, approximately six to eight children were randomly selected from each of 106 classrooms from among those children for whom parental consent had been received. The 492 children who participated in the
Results
Table 2 displays the key variables of emergent literacy for the full sample in both domains of oral language and code-related skills. (It is important to note that standard scores and percentile ranks are presented where possible to allow comparison to a norm-referenced sample. However, raw scores converted to T-scores were used in the analyses.) As a group, the children performed between the 25th and 33rd percentiles on measures of oral language and just below the standardized mean in print
Discussion
The purpose of the present study was to identify and validate profiles of emergent literacy skills among English-speaking preschoolers from low-SES backgrounds. The five internally and externally validated clusters showed there to be systematic individual differences among groups of children in their emergent literacy skills. Importantly, our findings indicate that early patterns of performance appear to be meaningful to subsequent reading achievement and, in turn, may have the potential to
Limitations and future directions
A few salient limitations of this study warrant note. The first pertains to the generalizability of the resulting clusters. The extent to which our sample represents the more general low-SES preschool population is unclear. Although children from the larger studies were randomly selected from classrooms across one mid-Atlantic state, only those with complete data sets of key emergent literacy skills participated in the present study. The sample comprised largely native speakers of English, and
Acknowledgements
The authors thank the many teachers, children, and research staff who made this study possible, with special mention to Amy Sofka, Alice Wiggins, Elizabeth Cottone, Khara Pence Turnbull, and Sarah Friel. This research project was supported by Grants R305G050057 and R305F050124 from the U.S. Department of Education, Institute of Education Sciences.
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