Child and Home Predictors of Children's Name Writing

Hope K Gerde,Tiffany L Martoccio,Lori E Skibbe,Ryan P Bowles

doi:10.1155/2012/748532

Abstract

The current study used dominance analysis to investigate the relative importance of multiple factors on children's (ages 3–5; mean age of 47.3 months) name writing skill when they enter preschool. Children () were tested individually at the beginning of preschool on six factors thought to be important for name writing success: letter knowledge, decoding, motor skills, problem behaviors, self-regulation, and home literacy environment. Collectively, these variables explained 37.1% of the variation in children's name writing, but the importance of each factor differed widely. Children’s knowledge of capital letters (11.8%) and their motor development (11.8%) were the most important for children’s name writing whereas the home learning environment (2.3%) and reported problem behaviors (1.5%) were the least important factors. These findings suggest that researchers and teachers should focus on letter knowledge and motor development in understanding and promoting children’s name writing skills.

Highlights

Recent policy reports [1, 2] identify emergent writing, the period of time in which a child begins to understand the function of writing and early writing skills develop, as an important aspect of children’s literacy development
The present study used dominance analysis [24, 70] to provide a valid means for establishing relative importance among a set of collinear predictors of children’s name writing skills; in the current study, we examined the unique contributions from each of the six individual predictors
Results indicate that many factors explained a substantial proportion of the variance in children’s name writing skills; the relative contribution made by each factor varied greatly

Summary

Introduction

Recent policy reports [1, 2] identify emergent writing, the period of time in which a child begins to understand the function of writing and early writing skills develop, as an important aspect of children’s literacy development. Previous longitudinal research has identified the importance of emergent writing for predicting other literacy skills well into elementary school. Previous research has identified emergent writing skills to be a key predictor of later reading ability [5, 6]. Preschoolers vary considerably in their ability to write their name [9,10,11], and this variation is related to other important aspects of early literacy development such as word recognition [12] and letter knowledge [13, 14]. The National Early Literacy Panel [2] notes that children’s ability to write their name in preschool predicts later literacy achievement, highlighting the importance of this facet of writing for young children

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion