Profiles of emergent literacy skills among preschool children who are at risk for academic difficulties

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Abstract

The purpose of this study was to explore patterns of within-group variability in the emergent literacy skills of preschoolers who are at risk for academic difficulties. We used the person-centered approach of cluster analysis to identify profiles of emergent literacy skills, taking into account both oral language and code-related skills. Participants were 492 preschoolers (aged 42–60 months) enrolled in needs-based programs. In the fall of the academic year, children were administered eight measures of emergent literacy: four oral language measures (i.e., expressive and receptive grammar, expressive and receptive vocabulary) and four code-related measures (i.e., print concepts, alphabet knowledge, name writing, and rhyme). Controlling for age, hierarchical-agglomerative and K-means cluster analysis procedures were employed. Five psychometrically sound profiles emerged: highest emergent literacy (prevalence = 14%); three profiles with average oral language and differential code-related abilities (16%, 24%; 23%); and lowest oral language with broad code-related weaknesses (23%). Profiles were then compared on midyear teacher ratings of emergent literacy as well as end-of-kindergarten literacy performance; results provided convergent evidence of predictive validity. This study highlights the considerable heterogeneity of emergent literacy abilities within an “at-risk” group. The resulting profiles have theoretical and practical relevance when examining both concurrent relationships between oral language and code-related skills as well as longitudinal relationships between early patterns of performance and later reading achievement.

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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