Abstract
The purpose of this research was to identify the presence of different school readiness profiles and to determine whether profiles could differentially predict academic growth. The Early Childhood Longitudinal Study: 2010-11 (ECLS-K: 2011) public data set was used, and participants were 14,954 first-time kindergarteners. The age of entering kindergarten ranged from 44.81–87.98 months with a mean of 76.13 months. In Study 1, a six-dimensional construct of school readiness was used: health, self-regulation, social and emotional development, language development, cognitive development, and approaches to learning. Results revealed 41 profiles with the top six school readiness profiles covering 85% of the sample: (1) Positive Development (28%); (2) Comprehensive At-Risk (24%); (3) Personal and Social Strengths (20%); (4) Cognitive and Language Strengths (5%), (5) Health Strength (5%); and (6) Cognitive, Personal and Social Strengths (3%). Study 2 examined whether school readiness profiles could predict children’s reading and math achievement growth using growth curve models. Results showed that different school readiness profile membership had unique academic growth patterns and could predict academic growth above and beyond child and family background variables. Moreover, children with the Positive Development profile had higher academic achievement over time. Children with the Personal and Social Strengths profile had the largest growth rates. In sum, findings support the inclusion of self-regulation as another dimension of school readiness and the important role of personal and social skills in the development of reading and math achievement.
Highlights
School readiness skills, including cognitive, social, attentional, and self-regulation skills, lay the foundation for future school success
Latent Class Analysis (LCA) allows children to be classified into different school readiness profiles, where each profile illustrates a unique pattern of school readiness skills, accounting for the possible interaction effects among these skills
Building from previous research, the present study aimed to extend current knowledge by (1) conceptualizing school readiness as a multi-dimensional construct that includes selfregulation skills in addition to the five previous dimensions that have been used, (2) applying Diagnostic Classification Models (DCMs; Rupp et al, 2010) to classify children into different school readiness profiles, and (3) adopting growth curve models (GCMs; e.g., Hoffman, 2015) to investigate the association between school readiness profile memberships and academic growth, above and beyond background variables
Summary
School readiness skills, including cognitive, social, attentional, and self-regulation skills, lay the foundation for future school success. Considerable research has demonstrated a link between kindergarten cognitive skills and later elementary school achievement (La Paro and Pianta, 2000; Bodovski and Farkas, 2007; Duncan et al, 2007; Claessens et al, 2009). Children entering kindergarten with stronger math and literacy skills tend to have higher math and reading achievement in later grades. There is evidence that social skills, attention skills, and selfregulation skills are important predictors of academic and behavioral outcomes (La Paro and Pianta, 2000; Trentacosta and Izard, 2007; Claessens et al, 2009; Morgan et al, 2016). Disability Status Students without disability Students with disability Missing. BOutcome variables were outcome variables in GCMs. level of the achievement at kindergarten entry as well as his/her own growth rates (Equation 3). More details of GCMs can be found in Appendix G in Supplementary Material.
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