Predicting Academic Achievement in Kindergarten and First Grade from Prekindergarten Scores on the Lollipop Test and Dial

Abstract

The focus of the present study was on the multivariate relationship of two predictors of school readiness administered four months prior to kindergarten to two groups of criteria. A sample of 110 children from rural Georgia were followed longitudinally. The overall results indicate a high degree of commonality between the Developmental Indicators for the Assessment of Learning and the Lollipop Test. Both predictors demonstrated equivalent ability to predict students' grades and standardized test scores over two years of investigation. Canonical correlations ranged from .68 to .83 and suggested that the predictor scores accounted for approximately half of the variance in the grades and test scores of kindergarten and first-grade children.