Connections Between Participation in Early Reading First Classrooms and School-Aged Language and Literacy Development

This investigation examined the effects of participation in The Time is Now in Pre-K Early Reading First (ERF) project on kindergarten, first, and second grade literacy outcomes. End-of-year language and literacy data collected by the participating school district was analyzed for 170 students (Year 1 = 89; Year 2 = 81). This investigation allowed for a multi-year examination of student performance following participation in an ERF project, and answered the call to conduct research on larger scale preschool programs that significantly improve student oral language and literacy skills. Independent t-tests demonstrated that intervention students performed statistically significantly better than comparison students on first grade measures of phoneme segmentation and oral retelling fluency. In kindergarten, there were no significant differences on tasks related to book and print awareness and writing. In first grade there were no significant differences on writing and phonological awareness tasks. Additional analyses examined whether the effects of participation in the ERF project were associated with or mediated by student-level demographics and environmental factors (i.e., teacher and school assignment) and if the effects of participation in the ERF project changed after one year of literacy instruction. Multiple regression equations determined that a full, six-variable model (i.e., age, gender, race, language spoken, exceptionality, and condition) significantly predicted student performance on a writing subtest. Intervention condition emerged as having the largest negative impact upon student performance with smaller negative impacts associated with language spoken, race, gender and an identified disability. Using Hierarchical Linear Modeling assuming fixed and random effects, the combined effect of teacher and school assignment had a statistically significant impact upon student receptive vocabulary, upper and lower case letter knowledge and use of oral language. Paired samples t-tests revealed that both intervention and comparison Year 1 student oral retelling scores significantly decreased between the end of kindergarten and the end of first grade. The results of this study provide positive support for the impact of ERF, and help identify for whom value-added impacts were achieved. This project offers valuable information regarding educational practices and future research related to the development of language- and literacy-related skills in young childrenDoctor of Philosoph