Describing patterns of early literacy skill development in the first year of school and reading instruction in a New Zealand sample.

Abstract

This study describes trajectories of early literacy skill development of 99 children (n ϭ 55 boys) in their first year of primary school in New Zealand (NZ). Children were assessed twice weekly for 8 weeks on Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills (DIBELS; Good & Kaminski, 2011) First Sound Fluency (FSF) and AIMSweb Letter Sound Fluency (LSF;Shinn & Shinn, 2002), with other early literacy and beginning reading skills assessed before and after progress monitoring. FSF and LSF growth trajectories were modeled separately. Multilevel modeling indicated improved performance; however, growth mixture modeling indicated 3 growth trajectories (i.e., latent classes; FSF and LSF, respectively): typical (77.6% of children, 65.7%), developing (10.8%, 14.6%), and limited progress (11.6%, 19.7%). Beginning of year screening was sometimes associated with latent class membership, whereas latent class membership differentiated mid-and year-end literacy skills. Results support progress monitoring of early literacy skills within the NZ context to aid earlier identification of children at-risk for difficulties with reading acquisition. Impact and ImplicationsThis study demonstrated that monitoring children's progress on early literacy skills over one term can reflect skill development in the first year of school. Although most children's performance improved over time, this study identified distinct growth trajectories, finding some children with low initial performance who showed limited progress. This research supports screening and progress monitoring for earlier identification and provision of supports to children experiencing challenges with reading acquisition.

School-entry skills and early skill trajectories predict reading after 1 year.

“…T. A. Cameron, Carroll, et al (2022) found associations between these latent classes (categories) of growth trajectories and criterion measures included after progress monitoring.…”

“…Phonemic awareness typically grows during beginning reading instruction (Castles et al, 2018). Literacy researchers have employed tools to tap developing phonemic awareness during early schooling in English-speaking contexts, assessing earlier developing onset phoneme awareness (T. A. Cameron et al, 2020; Oslund et al, 2017) to more advanced phoneme segmentation skills (Ritchey & Speece, 2006; Tindal et al, 2015).…”

“…Children commencing U.S. kindergarten typically do not perform well on letter-sound correspondence tasks (Nese et al, 2017), although they typically demonstrate growth over the year (Nese et al, 2017; Sáez et al, 2016). Early kindergarten may be a potentially important developmental window for letter-sound correspondence growth (T. A. Cameron et al, 2020; Clemens et al, 2020).…”

“…Beginning schooling in NZ, in which children enter school, and begin reading instruction, typically on their fifth birthday, provides a unique opportunity for following children’s literacy development, controlling for potential relative age effects in early learning (where relatively older students may be advantaged over younger students; Mavilidi et al, 2022). To our knowledge, T. A. Cameron, Carroll, et al (2022) are the first to follow children’s early literacy and word reading acquisition across the first 6 months of school.…”

Using ECL Media to Improve Information Literacy of Islamic Elementary School Students

“…According to the Association of College and Research Libraries information literacy is considered a basic need in learning throughout life that is useful for all disciplines and educational levels (Elrod et al, 2012). Parents and teachers need to provide support to children to develop literacy abilities (Cameron et al, 2020;Saracho, 2021).…”