Early Reading Measures Research Articles

An examination of the heterogenous nature of literacy development in Spanish-speaking preschool children

ABSTRACT This study evaluated the emergent literacy profiles of preschool Spanish-speaking children. Participants included 440 children in dual-language classrooms who were assessed in English and Spanish at the beginning and end of their preschool year. Research Findings: Through latent profile analysis, conducted with fall data, four empirically derived emergent literacy profiles emerged. Further analyses were conducted to determine if there were differential relations between the literacy profiles and spring early reading measures of alphabet knowledge and oral language, measures that are typically used to evaluate kindergarten readiness for literacy instruction. Practice or Policy: Results highlight the heterogeneous nature of emergent literacy development in Spanish-speaking children and demonstrate the need for individualized literacy instruction during the preschool years.

Use of early word-reading fluency measures to predict outcomes on the Phonics Screening Check

Teachers in England and South Australia annually administer the Phonics Screening Check (PSC) to Year 1 students, with the purpose of identifying struggling readers. Students who do not meet the score threshold have not met the expected standard of word-decoding ability, meaning further support may be warranted. We sought to quantify the extent to which other early reading measures, such as the Wheldall Assessment of Reading Nonwords (WARN) and Wheldall Assessment of Reading Lists (WARL), predicted students’ likelihood of not meeting PSC expected standards. Predicting PSC outcomes, and thereby identifying struggling readers at the start of Year 1, has important implications for possible intervention strategies. Logistic regression and receiver operating characteristic analyses were conducted to examine the longitudinal relationships between real-word and pseudoword predictors as measured by the WARL and WARN and PSC pass/fail outcomes. Students who scored lower on predictors were less likely to meet the PSC expected standards. Results indicate that the WARL and WARN could be used to identify students who will not meet PSC expected standards, facilitating earlier intervention where it is most critically required.

Neural organization of ventral white matter tracts parallels the initial steps of reading development: A DTI tractography study

Insight in the developmental trajectory of the neuroanatomical reading correlates is important to understand related cognitive processes and disorders. In adults, a dual pathway model has been suggested encompassing a dorsal phonological and a ventral orthographic white matter system. This dichotomy seems not present in pre-readers, and the specific role of ventral white matter in reading remains unclear. Therefore, the present longitudinal study investigated the relation between ventral white matter and cognitive processes underlying reading in children with a broad range of reading skills (n = 61). Ventral pathways of the reading network were manually traced using diffusion tractography: the inferior fronto-occipital fasciculus (IFOF), inferior longitudinal fasciculus (ILF) and uncinate fasciculus (UF). Pathways were examined pre-reading (5–6 years) and after two years of reading acquisition (7–8 years). Dimension reduction for the cognitive measures resulted in one component for pre-reading cognitive measures and a separate phonological and orthographic component for the early reading measures. Regression analyses revealed a relation between the pre-reading cognitive component and bilateral IFOF and left ILF. Interestingly, exclusively the left IFOF was related to the orthographic component, whereas none of the pathways was related to the phonological component. Hence, the left IFOF seems to serve as the lexical reading route, already in the earliest reading stages.

Eye Movement Evidence for Context-Sensitive Derivation of Scalar Inferences

A scalar expression like some can optionally have an enriched interpretation (approximately meaning “some, but not all”) depending on the context in which it appears. Numerous experiments using the self-paced reading method have found evidence that context has an online effect on the interpretation of a scalar term, resulting in faster or slower reading times for a later phrase whose comprehension is dependent on the interpretation of some. The present study used eye movements to isolate the time course of this process. We find evidence that the reading time facilitation observed in previous studies was driven by early reading measures, with little reading time evidence for an immediate inference-based processing cost at the scalar expression itself, consistent with previous studies. Our results suggest that comprehenders can rapidly commit to enriched interpretations online without cost and that these enriched interpretations are then used to guide the processing of upcoming sentence material.

Semantic and plausibility preview benefit effects in English: Evidence from eye movements.

Theories of preview benefit in reading hinge on integration across saccades and the idea that preview benefit is greater the more similar the preview and target are. Schotter (2013) reported preview benefit from a synonymous preview, but it is unclear whether this effect occurs because of similarity between the preview and target (i.e., integration), or because of contextual fit of the preview-synonyms satisfy both accounts. Studies in Chinese have found evidence for preview benefit for words that are unrelated to the target, but are contextually plausible (Yang, Li, Wang, Slattery, & Rayner, 2014; Yang, Wang, Tong, & Rayner, 2012), which is incompatible with an integration account but supports a contextual fit account. Here, we used plausible and implausible unrelated previews in addition to plausible synonym, antonym, and identical previews to further investigate these accounts for readers of English. Early reading measures were shorter for all plausible preview conditions compared to the implausible preview condition. In later reading measures, a benefit for the plausible unrelated preview condition was not observed. In a second experiment, we asked questions that probed whether the reader encoded the preview or target. Readers were more likely to report the preview when they had skipped the word and not regressed to it, and when the preview was plausible. Thus, under certain circumstances, the preview word is processed to a high level of representation (i.e., semantic plausibility) regardless of its relationship to the target, but its influence on reading is relatively short-lived, being replaced by the target word, when fixated. (PsycINFO Database Record

Technical Adequacy and Cost Benefit of Four Measures of Early Literacy

Technical adequacy and information/cost return were examined for four early reading measures: the Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills (DIBELS), STAR Early Literacy (SEL), Group Reading Assessment and Diagnostic Evaluation (GRADE), and the Texas Primary Reading Inventory (TPRI). All four assessments were administered to the same students in each of Grades K through 2 over a 5-week period; the samples included 200 students per grade from 7 states. Both SEL and DIBELS were administered twice to establish their retest reliability in each grade. We focused on the convergent validity of each assessment for measuring five critical components of reading development identified by the U.S. National Research Panel: Phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, comprehension, and fluency. DIBELS and TPRI both are asserted to assess all five of these components; GRADE and STAR Early Literacy explicitly measure all except fluency. For all components, correlations among relevant subtests were high and comparable. The pattern of intercorrelations of nonfluency measures with fluency suggests the tests of fluency, vocabulary, comprehension, and word reading are measuring the same underlying construct. A separate cost—benefit study was conducted and showed that STAR Early Literacy was the most cost-effective measure among those studied. In terms of amount of time per unit of test administration or teachers’ time, CAT (computerized adaptive testing) in general, and STAR Early Literacy in particular, is an attractive option for early reading assessment.

Brief experimental analysis of early reading interventions

The purpose of this study was to investigate how brief experimental analyses (BEAs) could be used to identify effective interventions for Kindergartners (2 girls and 2 boys, 5 years and 7–10 months old) with low performance and/or growth slope in letter sound fluency (LSF). Interventions were tested within a multielement design with brief mini-reversals until an intervention yielding at least 20% improvement on a specific subskill measure or a curriculum-based measure of LSF was identified. BEA-identified interventions were implemented one-on-one for 5 to 9 weeks. A multiple-baseline design across participants showed large intervention effects (average adjusted d = 2.4) on general outcome measures, supporting treatment validity of BEAs. Findings extend the BEA literature to younger participants, early reading interventions, and early reading measures.

Investigating the psychometric properties of three French language early reading measures

Few empirical studies have examined the development of French reading skills in French immersion programs. The present study investigated the psychometric properties of three French early reading measures of phonological awareness and the alphabetic principle. The measures: Facilite a segmenter les phonemes (FSP), Facilite a lire des non‐mots (FNM), and Facilite en lecture orale (FLO) are modeled after DIBELS (Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills) English literacy measures recognized as strong predictors of later reading achievement. The purpose was to investigate the reliability and predictive validity of these measures. Participants were 51 students from a partial French immersion school. Results indicate Phase 1 FNM scores strongly correlated with later Phase 2 FNM and FLO scores. Phase 1 FLO scores are significantly correlated with later Phase 2 FLO scores. Findings indicate these two measures showed sufficient reliability and validity for measuring French reading skills. The third was no...

Intensifying Instruction

Research is clear on the benefit of early intervention efforts and the importance of intensive instructional supports; however, understanding which features to intensify is less clear. General intervention features of group size, instructional delivery, and time are areas schools can consider manipulating to intensify instruction. Also, each of these features can vary along a continuum making them easier or more challenging for schools to implement. What is unclear is if implementing very intensive interventions early in school (first grade), which require significantly more school resources, provides accordingly accelerated student learning. This article investigates the role of intensifying instructional time for the most at-risk first graders in schools implementing research-based instructional and assessment practices within multitiered instructional support systems. Results indicate that students receiving more intensive intervention made significantly more progress across a range of early reading measures. Intervention features, limitations, recommendations for practice, and implications for treatment resisters are discussed.

The Relationship between Phonological Awareness and Early Reading for First Grade Korean Language Learners with Reading Difficulties

This study investigated the differences in four components of phonological awareness (i.e., judgment, deletion, blending, and substitution) and early reading ability across reading levels, and the correlation between phonological awareness (PA) and early reading ability in low and average-achievement groups. 27 students with reading difficulties and 34 students with average reading abilities participated in the study, and all participants were native Korean students in Grade One. The results indicated significant differences between low-achievement and averageachievement groups in PA and early reading measures, which revealed features of Korean phonology as different from English. Furthermore, phonological awareness showed significant positive correlation with both word identification and reading fluency for the low and average-achievement groups. For the low-achievement group, the correlation between phonological awareness and reading fluency was higher than between phonological awareness and word identification.

Early reading assessment: a practitioner's handbook

Introduction I. Advances in Early Reading Assessment 1. Critical Issues in Early Reading Assessment 2. Evaluating the Technical Adequacy and Usability of Early Reading Measures 3. A Component-Based Approach to Early Reading Assessment II. Early Reading Measures 4. Early Reading Assessment Batteries 5. Measures of Reading Components Appendix A. Selected Test Publishers and Sources Appendix B. Internet Resources for Early Reading Assessment Appendix C. Glossary

Phonological awareness, speech development, and letter knowledge in preschool children

Phonological awareness has been shown to be one of the most reliable predictors and associates of reading ability. In an attempt to better understand its development, we have examined the interrelations of speech skills and letter knowledge to the phonological awareness and early reading skills of 99 preschool children. We found that phoneme awareness, but not rhyme awareness, correlated with early reading measures. We further found that phoneme manipulation was closely associated with letter knowledge and with letter sound knowledge, in particular, where rhyme awareness was closely linked with speech perception and vocabulary. Phoneme judgment fell in between. The overall pattern of results is consistent with phonological representation as an important factor in the complex relationship between preschool children’s phonological awareness, their emerging knowledge of the orthography, and their developing speech skills. However, where rhyme awareness is a concomitant of speech and vocabulary development, phoneme awareness more clearly associates with the products of literacy experience.