In the United States, for typically developing children, age has historically been the most common factor determining when a child starts formal schooling. Recently, there has been increased emphasis on other indicators of being ready for school. Beginning with Head Start in 1965 and mushrooming into state-funded prekindergarten programs in most…

Forty middle-class American mothers and their preschool children were observed in a narrative activity which involved telling a story using the Berenstain Bears Play Set as a stimulus. The goal of the study was to examine the presence of story grammar elements in both maternal and preschool narratives. In addition, the study sought to explore the…

Reading and writing are necessary prerequisites for a successful school career. Therefore it is important to identify precursor variables which predict these abilities early in order to identify children possibly at risk of developing reading or spelling difficulties. Relevant precursors include letter knowledge, phonological awareness (PA),…

There is a considerable and growing body of research investigating reading development in children with Down syndrome. However, there appears to be a common gap between the research evidence and instructional practices. It has been argued that teachers have insufficient information to enable them to implement effective literacy instruction with…

Teachers at Orlando Day Nursery in Florida have always evaluated how well their 4-year-old prekindergartners--most of them poor and African-American--could recognize letters, isolate sounds in words, understand stories read to them, and show other hallmarks of early literacy. Just as important, though, have been the teachers' formal observations…

This study examined the predictive validity of combinations of progress-monitoring measures: (a) curriculum-embedded phonemic awareness and alphabetic/decoding measures, and (b) Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills (DIBELS; Good & Kaminski, 2002) nonsense word fluency and phoneme segmentation fluency on reading outcomes of…

State and local assessment data from 117 students in one school in the California Central Valley were examined to determine how much participation in a kindergarten through second grade multitiered reading intervention model contributed to third grade reading achievement, over and above the demographic factors of ethnicity, socioeconomic status,…

Purpose: Letter knowledge is a key aspect of children's language development, yet relatively little research has aimed to understand the nature of lowercase letter knowledge. We considered 4 hypotheses about children's lowercase letter knowledge simultaneously--uppercase familiarity, uppercase-lowercase similarity, own-name advantage, and…

Among a nationally representative sample of 2336 Head Start children, patterns of school readiness were compared at the beginning and end of children's first preschool year, and predictors of stability and change across readiness profiles were examined. The present study documented that although the majority of children remain in a qualitatively…

Past research indicates that parents often have difficulty in assessing centre quality and accessing desired care when choosing early care for their children. This study surveyed parents whose children would qualify for state-funded pre-kindergarten in the following school year. Surveys were completed by 203 parents from varying socioeconomic and…

Researchers have suggested that children who are interested in literacy activities and voluntarily engage in them are likely to become better readers than children with less literacy interest. Literacy interest, along with engaging literacy activities and responsive teaching, are important components in children's early literacy experiences. This…

Sparked by the Common Core State Standards, teachers and literacy experts are arguing about the role of a time-honored pillar of English/language arts instruction: classroom activities designed to help students understand what they are about to read. The attacks on--and defenses of--"prereading" are unfolding largely in cyberspace, through online…

This study evaluated factors within families that enhance kindergarten reading readiness of children and are also linked to maternal education (a common proxy for SES). We were interested in identifying factors that would be more accessible to families and school administrators as sources of potential change than broad and un-malleable reflections…

Background: This investigation was sparked by research findings on secondary education showing school segregation to be closely associated with homogeneous grouping practices, such as tracking and between-class ability grouping. Research Design: We conduct secondary analyses of national data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Kindergarten…

Promoting literacy development was not a priority for early childhood special educators 25 years ago. The turn of the century gave rise to a scientific basis of reading that outlined what skills need to be taught to facilitate literacy achievement. Steady progress has been made in moving early childhood education to teaching the skills that are…