Predicting academic performance in children with language impairment: The role of parent report
Section snippets
Preschool language impairment and academic achievement
Considerable evidence exists for negative effects of preschool language impairment on later academic achievement. Research in this realm has examined outcomes in academic areas involving written language, including reading, spelling and writing, as well as in mathematics. Methodologies used have included prospective longitudinal investigations in which a cohort of children is followed for a period of years (e.g. Badian, Duffy, Als, & McAnulty, 1991; Badian, McAnulty, Duffy, & Als, 1990;
Parent report and preschool language impairment
Recent reviews of the research on the role of parent report in understanding the presence and nature of language impairment reveal some inconsistency in findings. That is, while parents of both typical children and children with language impairment appear to consistently overestimate their children's language abilities, their ratings of language correlate with other measures of language and appear to be congruent with the ratings of professionals (see Dale, 1996; Hauerwas & Stone, 2000, for
Participants
Thirty-five participants were identified from a cohort of 132 preschool children with language impairment initially seen in one testing site of a large, multi-center project investigating developmental disorders in children (see Rapin, 1996 for description of initial project). To be entered in the original preschool project, children were required to meet the following criteria:
- 1.
age between 3 years, 0 months and 5 years, 11 months;
- 2.
normal hearing sensitivity as determined using pure tone
Results
To identify the preschool variables most predictive of later academic achievement, stepwise regression analyses were conducted for each of the dependent variables (the four follow-up academic measures) using SPSS® (1998) software. In using a stepwise method, the computer builds models on the basis of the predictive value of each variable, with variables of significant value being added to the model, and those of little value being removed. Results of these analyses are presented by academic
Discussion
This study examined the strength of parent report and other preschool language measures in predicting later academic achievement in children with language impairment. Two research questions were investigated; the answers to which are closely related. In answering the first question, which sought to identify the best preschool predictors of school-age academics, we found that the Communication Domain of the Vineland was the single best predictor of reading, writing, and math scores, while the
Acknowledgements
This manuscript includes research conducted by the second author while a high school student enrolled in Upward Bound at the University of Maine. Portions of this work were presented to the 2002 Annual Convention of the American Speech–Language–Hearing Association, Atlanta, GA. Thanks to Kristen Higgins for her help with data management, and to Allan Smith and Stacy Wagovich for comments on an earlier draft. This research was supported in part by NIH Program Project Grant NS 20489: “Nosology of
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