The Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT) is a widely used test of receptive vocabulary, but no researchers to date have examined the performance of low-educated, low-literate L2 adults, or compared these individuals' performances to their more highly educated peers. In this study, we used many-facet Rasch analysis and mixed-effects linear…

Young children are often enrolled in either AM (morning) or PM (afternoon) sessions in early childhood programs. However, little research is available on this routine practice. We used multilevel analysis to investigate if there are differences in the literacy, math, and social outcomes for children who participate in AM or PM sessions beyond…

The present contribution aims at presenting an assessment tool (i.e., the TALK-assessment) built to evaluate the language development and school readiness of Italian preschoolers before they enter primary school, and its predictive validity for the children's reading and writing skills at the end of the first year of primary school. The early…

Purpose: This was an investigation of the dimensionality of oral and written language to test the hypothesis that a two-factor model with sound/word and sentence/discourse language levels would best fit language and literacy data for a population-based sample in the school-age years. Method: A stratified secondary data set of 1,500 participants…

The present study explores the longitudinal development between Grade 3 word level reading skills and higher level semantic skills to Grade 10 reading comprehension for 3,157 students. In particular, this work focused on how the developmental relations varied for subsamples of students who are English learners (EL; N = 308), students identified as…

Assessing English learners (ELs) in US schools is challenging because many widely used assessments have not been designed with ELs in mind. Yet if teachers are sensitive to how ELs may perform differently from native speakers on such assessments, these assessments reveal useful information about ELs' language and literacy skills. This mixed-method…

The Florida Center for Reading Research (FCRR) Reading Assessment (FRA) consists of computer-adaptive reading comprehension and oral language screening tasks that provide measures to track growth over time, as well as a Probability of Literacy Success (PLS) linked to grade-level performance (i.e., the 50th percentile) on the reading comprehension…

The Kindergarten Early Learning Scale (KELS) was developed as a concise observational assessment for young children. It examines three domains including (1) Math/Science, (2) Social Emotional/Social Studies, and (3) Language and Literacy, with a total of 10 items across the domains. Scores reported for each of the 10 items are based upon…

Although more than a third of tested pre-K students (37%) entered AISD one standard deviation below the national average in receptive vocabulary, the AISD pre-K program accelerated these students' growth by nearly twice the national average by the end of the 2010-2011 school year.

A number of studies have reported positive associations between music experience and increased abilities in non-musical (e.g., linguistic, mathematical, and spatial) domains in children. These transfer effects continue to be probed using a variety of experimental designs. The major aim of this quasi-experimental study was to examine the effects of…

Background: Children who meet language test criteria for specific language impairment (SLI) are not necessarily the same as those who are referred to a speech and language therapist. Aims: To consider how far this discrepancy reflects insensitivity of traditional language tests to clinically important features of language impairment. Methods &…

The purpose of this study was to describe literacy instruction in child care centers, examine aspects of child care center quality that may predict such instruction, and provide a limited analysis of whether literacy instruction impacts children's concurrent pre-academic functioning. Staff and children in 103 classrooms serving preschool-age…

Article discussed the growing problem of declining verbal skills of the American precollege student. (Author/RK)

National assessments of U.S. high school students' writing and other verbal abilities do not show that literacy has declined substantially in recent years. In fact, scores have been relatively stable since the 1980s. The proportion of students with solid writing and reading abilities has held fairly steady but remained small during the past 25…

Examines the recent decline in verbal scores on the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) and suggests that demographic shifts, as well as a movement toward a more iconic, oral society resulting from videotapes, are responsible. The use of hypermedia and multimedia is discussed, and the definition of literacy is considered. (LRW)