The Kindergarten and First Grade Intervention Study
Kindergarten Screening
This was a five-year longitudinal that was initiated in late spring 1997 and terminated in late spring 2002. Participants in this study were children from lower middle to upper middle class schools in suburban and rural schools in up-state New York. The initial sample consisted of 1,373 children assessed at the beginning of kindergarten. There were two cohorts of these children consisting of comparable percentages of males and females in each cohort (54% males in Cohort 1 and 50% males in Cohort 2). All children in both cohorts were given a test of letter-name knowledge when they entered kindergarten, and approximately 30% were identified as being "at risk" for early reading difficulties on the basis of their performance on this test. Letter-name knowledge was used for initial screening purposes because it has proven to be the single best predictor of early reading achievement, both in our laboratory and elsewhere, (e.g. Adams, 1990; Vellutino et al., 1996). However, to further document their "at risk" status, these children were also given tests evaluating phonological awareness (sensitivity to rhyme and alliteration), rapid automatized naming of objects, counting by 1's, and number identification.
Table 1 presents results on all of these tests for the kindergarten children from both cohorts who were placed in the at risk group as well as for the kindergarten children from these cohorts who were not identified as at risk. It can be seen that the children who were identified as at risk for early reading difficulties performed at levels well below the children who were not identified as at risk for early reading difficulties on all of the screening measures. This finding is noteworthy because it suggests that performance on a letter-naming test is a reasonably good barometer of performance on other reading-related phonological and emergent literacy skills and, therefore, provides additional evidence that letter-name knowledge is a useful (and low-cost) screening measure.
Kindergarten Intervention
In the next phase of the project, approximately half of the at-risk children were randomly assigned to a project intervention group (Project Treatment) and the other half were assigned to a school-based comparison group (School-Based Comparison). The School-Based Comparison group was initially slated to be our control group because the participating schools with whom we were collaborating were not providing remedial intervention services for their kindergarten children when the project was initiated. Table 2 presents results for these two groups on the tests included in our initial screening battery. It can be seen that the groups were not appreciably different on any of these measures at the outset.
The children assigned to the Project Treatment group were provided with a small group early literacy intervention program, which involved no more than 2 or 3 children per group. Those in each group met with a certified teacher (trained by project staff) twice each week for 30 minutes each session in a room outside of their classrooms. In addition, the project teacher worked with the children in their regular classroom once every other week. Remedial activities focused on emergent literacy skills such as knowledge of print concepts, print awareness, letter recognition, letter identification, phonological awareness, letter-sound mapping, sight word learning, shared and guided reading, and listening to and reading stories for pleasure. At-risk kindergartners in the School-Based Comparison group received whatever instructional support their school offered. Several of the participating schools chose to initiate their own kindergarten intervention program during the course of the project and offer it to children who had been initially assigned to what was intended to be our control group. Thus, as will be seen, contrasts between the Project Treatment and School-Based Comparison groups underestimated the effectiveness of providing early literacy intervention services in kindergarten.
Nevertheless, in order to evaluate the short term effects of our kindergarten intervention program, we compared the progress made by the at risk children who received kindergarten intervention offered by project teachers (Project Treatment) with the progress made by the at risk children who received whatever services were available at their home schools (School- Based Comparison). Specifically, we re-administered the letter identification and phonological awareness tests from our screening battery in December, March, and June of the children's kindergarten year. We also administered experimental tests evaluating print concepts, orthographic awareness, word identification (Primary Word Identification), knowledge of letter sounds, letter-sound decoding (Primary Decoding), and two additional phonological awareness skills: phoneme blending and phoneme segmentation1. Finally, we administered the Word Identification and Word Attack subtests from the Woodcock Reading Mastery Tests-Revised (WRMT-R, Woodcock, 1987) to evaluate word identification and phonological decoding in December and June of the children's kindergarten year. For present purposes, we present data only for our June (end of kindergarten year) assessment.
As is evident (Table 3), the Project Treatment group was found to perform somewhat better than the School-Based Comparison group on several of the measures. Considering an effect size of .50 as a moderately high group difference (in accord with accepted statistical criteria), it can be seen that the Project Treatment group performed appreciably better than the School-Based Comparison group on measures of phoneme segmentation, word identification, and letter-sound decoding. In fact, the Project Treatment group performed somewhat better then the School-Based Comparison group on most measures (note that neither group performed very well on the WRMT-R Word Identification and Word Attack tests, no doubt because this test is too difficult for kindergartners).
Yet, as we pointed out earlier, because many of the schools in the School-Based Comparison group began to offer their own intervention programs, the effects of the kindergarten intervention program offered by the project were no doubt underestimated in contrasts involving this group. A more valid assessment of the effects of our kindergarten intervention program is provided by contrasts involving children exposed to our intervention program and children in a small number of schools from the School-Based Comparison group that offered no intervention in kindergarten. These results are presented in Table 4. It can be seen that the effect sizes range from moderately high to very high, notwithstanding those from tests producing either ceiling or floor effects. Group differences were statistically meaningful on tests evaluating phonologically based literacy skills, in particular, phoneme segmentation, knowledge of letter names, knowledge of letter sounds, word identification, spelling, and letter-sound decoding. In contrast, group differences were either marginal or below statistically acceptable standards on tests evaluating print concepts, detection of rhyme, detection of alliteration, phoneme blending, and orthographic awareness. However, all effect sizes favor the Project Treatment group. Thus, it seems reasonable to suggest, from these results, that early intervention on behalf of at risk children identified at the beginning of kindergarten can significantly improve the foundational literacy skills of such children, and help prepare them for formal reading instruction in first grade.
Follow-Up of No-Longer-at-Risk Children
In the first grade intervention component of the project, children from our at risk kindergarten cohorts, who were in need of continued remedial services at the beginning of first grade, were provided either with daily one-to-one tutoring (half-hour per day) implemented by project teachers or with whatever remedial services were offered by their home schools. In order to distinguish between at risk children who continued to need remedial services in first grade and those who did not (ostensibly) need these services, the at risk children who had been assigned to the Project Treatment and School-Based Comparison groups in kindergarten were re-evaluated at the beginning of their first grade year, using the Letter Identification, Word Identification, and Word Attack subtests from the WRMT-R as well as measures of letter-sound knowledge (Letter Sounds), word identification (Primary Word Identification), and letter-sound decoding skills (Primary Decoding). A composite of these measures based on summed z scores from each of the tests was computed for each child and this score was used to identify children we designated as "poor readers". To insure an adequate number of poor readers in each of the treatment groups we wished to compare, we adopted a relatively lenient cut-off score for distinguishing children who continued to be at risk for reading difficulties from children who were no longer at risk for reading difficulties. Accordingly, we operationally defined a "poor reader" as a child whose summed z score was at or below the mid-point of the z score distribution for the at risk children who had been in our Project Treatment group in kindergarten (henceforth called the Kindergarten Intervention group). Thus, by definition, 50% of the Kindergarten Intervention group qualified as poor readers (this constituted approximately 15% of the first graders who initially entered the study as kindergartners). The same z score cutoff was used for children from the Kindergarten School-Based Comparison group. However, for this group, 60% of the children qualified as poor readers when the entire group was considered and 80% qualified when we considered only children from those schools in the Kindergarten School-Based Comparison group that did not offer their own kindergarten intervention program.
These results indicate that our Kindergarten Intervention program was reasonably successful in reducing the number of children who qualified as poor readers in first grade. They complement the finding that at risk children who received some form of kindergarten intervention generally performed above the level of at risk children who did not receive any kindergarten intervention on several measures of emergent literacy skills administered at the end of kindergarten. The combined results speak for the utility of implementing small group intervention for at risk children, identified on entry into kindergarten, as a vehicle for preventing early reading difficulties in first grade. Evaluating the effectiveness of this approach to preventing early and long term reading difficulties was, of course, one of the major objectives of our project.
However, to further evaluate the utility of kindergarten intervention for preventing early and long term reading difficulties, we followed the progress of the at risk children who did not qualify as poor readers at the beginning of first grade, in order to determine whether they maintained their no longer at risk status until the end of third grade when the project ended. These children were designated as the "No Longer At Risk" (NLAR) group. For purposes of comparison, the No-Longer-at-Risk group included children who received kindergarten intervention implemented by project teachers, as well children who did not receive kindergarten intervention implemented by project teaches, and we present results for these two groups separately. To provide a normative standard, we also identified a group of normally achieving readers at the beginning of first grade. This group consisted of children who were not identified as being at-risk in kindergarten and whose summed z scores on the assessments administered at the beginning of first grade were at or above 0. To further evaluate the influence of intelligence in acquiring skill in reading, the normal reader group was dichotomized into average IQ (AvIQNorm) and above average IQ (AbAvIQNorm) groups2.
Finally, we also followed the progress of the children who were identified as poor readers at the beginning of first grade. Some of these children received daily one-to-one tutoring in first grade implemented by project teachers and the remainder received the remedial services offered by their home schools. However, for the analyses we report in the next section, we do not distinguish these remedial groups.
The performance levels for the Poor Readers, the No Longer At Risk Groups, and the two normal reader groups, on the screening measures administered at the beginning of first grade, are presented in Table 5. Tables 6, 7, and 8 present results for these groups on the reading achievement measures administered at the end of first, second, and third grade3. It can be seen that at all assessment times, there is a linear trend across groups such that the Poor Readers performed at the lowest levels on almost all of the tests administered, the Normal Readers performed at the highest levels, and the children in the No Longer at Risk readers performed at levels intermediate to the Poor and Normal Readers. The only exceptions to this pattern of results occurred on the tests evaluating primary level word identification, where all groups were close to ceiling at the end of first, second, and third grade (Tables 6, 7, and 8). But, more important is the finding that the children in the No Longer at Risk groups performed solidly in the average or above average ranges, not only on all of the screening measures administered at the beginning of first grade, when these groups were initially identified (Table 5), but also on all of the reading achievement measures administered at the end of first, second, and third grade (Tables 6, 7, and 8). Given that all but a small group of at risk kindergartners received some form of remedial intervention throughout their kindergarten year (either through our project or through their home schools), it seems reasonable to suggest, from these results alone, that providing early intervention for at risk kindergartners is a useful means of preventing long term reading difficulties in most such children. It also appears to be a useful means of distinguishing between kindergarten children who need only a slight "boost" in order to meet grade level expectations (and are no longer at risk) and more severely impaired children who will continue to need remedial services in first grade and perhaps beyond first grade.
Note, however, that the children who were identified in first grade as poor readers, on average, made significant progress in acquiring all of the reading skills and subskills evaluated by our screening battery and reading achievement batteries. The progress made by these children is evident in comparisons between performance levels on the achievement tests administered at the beginning of first grade, on the one hand, and performance levels on the same tests administered at the end of first, second, and third grade on the other (Table 5 versus Tables 6, 7, and 8). Indeed, the most dramatic progress was made between the beginning and end of first grade, which is the period encompassing implementation of our first grade intervention program (and, of course, first grade intervention offered by a child's home school). Moreover, mean performance levels in the Poor Reader group, on virtually all of the reading measures at the end of first grade, were well within the average range. Furthermore, at least average level performance was generally maintained in this group on all of the reading measures administered at the end of second grade, as well as on those administered at the end of third grade, when the project ended. Thus, it seems reasonable to conclude, from this pattern of results, that most at risk children who continue to require remedial intervention services in first grade, after having received such intervention services in kindergarten, can acquire at least average level reading skills by the end of first grade and even beyond first grade, if such services are implemented at the beginning of first grade.
Previous Page | Next Page
First-Grade Study | First-Grade Intervention
1 The Primary Word Identification and Primary Decoding tests are experimental tests that were constructed and normed in our laboratory to avoid the "floor effects" typically observed with kindergarten and first-grade children on most commercially available standardized tests.
2 The normal reader group was dichotomized on the basis of the mean score of the normal reader distribution on the WISC III Full Scale IQ (Wechsler, 1991). This test was administered to all target children in third grade.
3 Note that reading comprehension was measured using the Reading Comprehension subtest from the Wechsler individual Achievement Test (Wechsler, 1992).
