This paper is about the extent of children's reading related knowledge and associations with reading achievement at seven years. It presents results, from a major longitudinal study of children's progress in 33 Inner London Education Authority (ILEA) infant schools, on six measures of preschool reading related knowledge—word matching, concepts about print, letter identification, word reading, handwriting, and oral vocabulary—and their associations with Young's Group Reading scores at seven years. The strongest association was between letter identification and reading at seven. Preschool oral vocabulary and handwriting were also significantly and independently related to reading at seven, though concepts about print, in contrast to other recent research, was no more related to later reading than was word matching. Results are set in the context of conflicting theories about the early teaching of reading and, in particular, about conflicting views on the extent of preschool reading related skills and which skills have the most relevance to later reading achievement.

No abstract

There is still much debate, particularly in North America, about whether teachers' expectations have an effect on pupils' achievement, and through which factors expectations might be mediated. This paper reports on associations between teachers' academic expectations at the beginning, and children's attainments at the end of the school year. The study took place in infant schools in London. Associations were significant during all three years of infant school, and were not explained by children's attainments at the time of the expectation rating. Range of effects, in standard deviation units, of associations between expectations and progress over the school year ranged from 0.4 to 0.8. Two possible mediating factors between expectations and attainment were explored: differential curriculum coverage and differential classroom behaviour. It was found that children for whom teachers had higher expectations were given a wider range of activities in written language and mathematics, and this was so over and above attainments at the beginning of the school year. In contrast, there was no evidence that expectations were related to measures of classroom interaction like teacher praise and instructional contact.

No abstract

No abstract