The Kindergarten and First Grade Intervention Study
First Grade Intervention
As we indicated earlier, 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. Children from both the Kindergarten Project Treatment group and the Kindergarten School-Based Comparison group, who qualified as poor readers in first grade, were randomly assigned to one of three conditions. Two of the conditions involved one-to-one remedial intervention administered by project teachers for 30 minutes each day. The third condition was a School-Based Comparison condition in which given children received the intervention that was normally available to them at their home school. The intervention the children received in the School-Based Comparison condition varied from school to school and included everything from daily one-to-one tutoring (e.g., Reading Recovery) to small group remedial reading groups provided a few times each week.
Both of the first grade intervention programs provided by project teachers involved the same instructional components in each daily lesson: re-reading familiar text and reading new text, along with activities to improve phonological skills, sight word identification, and writing. However, the intervention programs differed with regard to the emphasis placed either on activities designed to facilitate development of phonological skills or on activities designed to facilitate development of skills and strategies to identify unfamiliar words while engaged in reading continuous text. Thus, in the Phonological Skills Emphasis condition (PSE), 15 minutes was devoted to the phonological skills component of the lesson while 5 minutes was devoted to each of the other main activities: supported reading of continuous text, practice with sight word identification, and writing. The phonological skills component involved direct instruction to facilitate phonological awareness, knowledge of letter names and letter sounds, letter-sound decoding, and detection and use of phonetically and orthographically redundant phonograms (e.g. at in cat, fat, rat).
In the Text Emphasis condition (TE), 15 minutes was devoted to supported reading of continuous text while approximately 5 minutes was devoted to each of the other components of the lesson: phonological skills, sight word identification, and writing. Special emphasis was placed on activities designed to foster the use of complementary and interactive strategies for promoting accuracy and fluency in word identification in text processing, and reading for comprehension and enjoyment (Vellutino & Scanlon, 2002). Such activities included conjoint use of picture, context, and letter-sound cues for word identification, use of predictive strategies to aid word identification and comprehension, and comprehension monitoring. It should also be noted that we attempted to avoid the type of confounding that often occurs in instructional research. Thus, we used the same teachers to deliver the two intervention programs and we randomly assigned children from the same classroom to different treatment conditions.
Difficult to Remediate and Less Difficult to Remediate Children
Contrasts of the differential effectiveness of these different treatments, relative to the School-Based Comparison groups, was one of the major objectives of the present study, but these results are reported elsewhere and we do not focus on them here (see Scanlon, Vellutino, Small, & Fanuele, 2000; Scanlon, Vellutino, Small, Fanuele, & Sweeney, 2003; Vellutino & Scanlon, 2001). Of more immediate interest, for present purposes, are contrasts between children who were found to be difficult to remediate and children who were found to be less difficult to remediate4, relative to the children in the No Longer at Risk group and the normally achieving readers. Children in the Difficult to Remediate group were defined as those who performed below average on measures of reading skills at the end of third grade (when the project terminated), despite receiving remedial intervention services offered by project teachers in both kindergarten and first grade. Children in the Less Difficult to Remediate group were defined as those who performed at least in the average range on measures of reading skills at the end of third grade, after receiving the same remedial intervention services. Average or above average level performance was defined as a standard score of 90 or above on the Basic Skills Cluster of the WRMT-R. Below average performance was defined as a standard score below 90 on the same measure. Because it was impossible to control for or obtain detailed information about the remedial programs to which children in the kindergarten and first grade School-Based Comparison groups were exposed, the Difficult to Remediate and Less Difficult to Remediate groups include only the at risk children who were exposed to the remedial intervention programs provided by project teachers in both kindergarten and first grade. Similarly, the No Longer At Risk group includes only the at risk children who were exposed to the kindergarten intervention program provided by project teachers. Thus, we do not discuss results from the School-Based-Comparison groups any further in this paper. We should point out, however, that because the Phonological Skills Emphasis and the Text Emphasis conditions produced comparable results on measures of basic word level skills across grade levels, the Difficult to Remediate and Less Difficult to Remediate groups were dichotomized on the basis of scores on reading achievement measures collapsed across the two treatment conditions.
Table 9 presents results from reading and spelling achievement measures for five different reader groups: Difficult to Remediate (DR); Less Difficult to Remediate (LDR); No Longer at Risk (NLAR); normal readers having average intelligence (AvIQNorm); and normal readers having above average intelligence (AbAvIQNorm). Results in the tables are presented for assessments undertaken at the end of first, second and third grades. To provide a more synthesized overview, we also graph results for these grades as well as results for the beginning of first grade on the Word identification and Word Attack subtests from the Woodcock Reading Mastery Tests-Revised (WRMT-R, Woodcock, 1987) and on the Reading Comprehension subtest from the Wechsler Individual Achievement Test (WIAT, Wechsler, 1992; see Figures 1, 2, and 3). Once again we see a linear trend such that the DR children performed at the lowest levels on all measures of reading and spelling achievement, the AvIQNorm and AbAvIQNorm children performed at the highest levels, and the LDR and NLAR children performed at levels that are intermediate to the DR and the normal reader groups. Moreover, achievement levels in the LDR and NLAR groups are solidly in the average range. Further, the children in these two groups, on average, performed at comparable levels on all literacy measures across grade levels, with the NLAR group having a slight advantage over the LDR group on most of the measures. Also of interest is the fact that performance levels in both the LDR and NLAR groups approach those of the normal readers on many of the literacy measures by the end of third grade.
These findings are important. They suggest that early and long-term literacy difficulties can be prevented in most children at risk for such difficulties if they are identified at the beginning of kindergarten (if not sooner) and if appropriate intervention to establish foundational literacy skills is undertaken at the outset. They also suggest that most at risk kindergartners, from populations of school children such as those evaluated in this study, will require less intensive (e.g. small group) and less protracted intervention to prepare them for first grade literacy instruction, than will the smaller number of children who are found to be more difficult to remediate in kindergarten. Children of the latter description will, quite likely, require additional remedial assistance in first grade to prevent them from experiencing long-term reading difficulties. Yet, it is of some significance that over half (58%) of the (Project) Kindergarten Intervention children who continued to need and received remedial assistance in first grade, performed at solidly average levels on all measures of reading achievement at the end of first, second, and third grade. We may therefore conclude, from this pattern of results, that either kindergarten intervention alone or kindergarten and first grade intervention combined can prevent long-term reading difficulties in the majority of children identified as at risk for such difficulties at the beginning of kindergarten.
Note, however, that the mean score for the children in the DR group was also within the average range on all of the literacy measures at the end of first grade (albeit in the low average range on the reading comprehension measure). Yet, these children performed well below average on the word-level measures at the end of second and third grade. These findings suggest that most of the DR children were able to profit from the additional intervention they received in first grade, but obviously required more remedial assistance to consolidate and maintain their gains in order to become independent readers beyond first grade. Thus, it seems reasonable to infer that acquiring functional literacy skills was a more arduous enterprise for these children than it was for children in any of the other reader groups compared in this study.
Finally, in contrast to results obtained in our first intervention study (Vellutino et al., 1996), children in the AvIQNorm group generally performed below children in the AbAvIQNorm group on tests of word level skills as well on the test of reading comprehension. However, group differences were larger on the reading comprehension test than on the word level tests. And, except for tests where children had reached ceiling (e.g. Primary Word Identification), group differences were appreciably smaller on the tests evaluating phonological decoding and spelling skills than on the test evaluating word identification skills, especially by the end of third grade.
Cognitive Profiles of Reader Groups
In the Vellutino et al. (1996) study discussed earlier, we found that the normally developing readers generally performed above children identified as poor readers in mid-first grade on measures of reading-related cognitive abilities, especially phonological abilities that were administered in kindergarten and first grade. However, we also found that children who were readily remediated often performed above children who were difficult to remediate on such measures and their cognitive profiles were closer to those of an average IQ normal reader group than were the cognitive profiles of the difficult to remediate children. Essentially the same pattern of result was observed in follow-up assessments of the same children undertaken in third grade (Vellutino et al., 2003). The present findings, in essence, replicate the previous findings. Table 10 presents results contrasting the DR, LDR, NLAR, AvIQNorm and AbAvIQNorm groups on tests evaluating reading-related cognitive abilities administered in first and/or third grades. These include tests evaluating phonological awareness, orthographic awareness, rapid naming, confrontational naming, short term verbal memory (nonsense words, sentences, word strings, digits), semantic knowledge, verbal fluency, and verbal and non-verbal intelligence.
With the exception of scores on tests that are at ceiling and the test evaluating non-verbal intelligence (on which the DR, LDR, and AvIQNorm groups performed at comparable levels), we again see a linear trend such that the DR and LDR groups performed at the lowest levels, the AvIQNorm and AbAvIQNorm groups performed at the highest levels, and the NLAR group performed at levels intermediate to the poor and normal reader groups. However, especially noteworthy is the finding that the NLAR group performed at levels that were at, close to, or better than those of the AvIQNorm group on many of the cognitive measures and close to the levels of the AbAvIQNorm group on some of these measures. Moreover, on the rapid naming measures, performance levels in the LDR group were close to performance levels in the NLAR group, and appreciably better than performance levels in the DR group. And, except for differences on the intelligence, vocabulary, and verbal memory measures, differences between the AvIQNorm and the AbAvIQNorm groups on the various cognitive measures were small or non-existent.
In accord with a similar suggestion made in Vellutino et al. (1996), we suggest that these findings support the idea that the cognitive abilities, underlying reading ability can be placed on a continuum that determines the ease with which a child acquires functional literacy skills, relative to the amount and quality of the literacy experiences and the literacy instruction to which that child has been exposed. Thus, whereas a child with an optimum or near optimum mix of reading-related cognitive abilities is likely to acquire functional literacy skills with little or no difficulty, even under less than optimum experiential and instructional circumstances, the child with a less than optimum mix of reading related cognitive abilities will find literacy acquisition more challenging and will require more optimum literacy experiences and instruction to become functionally literate and to avoid early reading difficulties. By the same analysis, the child with significant deficiencies in cognitive abilities that underlie reading ability (e.g. phonological coding, phonological awareness, verbal memory deficits, etc.) may have extraordinary difficulty learning to read, and may experience early reading difficulties even under the most optimal experiential circumstances. Such children are likely to require compensatory instruction in order to become functionally literate. Thus, there is what some scholars have called a "gradation of risk" for becoming "reading disabled", depending on one's natural endowment interacting with the amount and quality of one's environmental and instructional experiences (Snowling, Gallagher, & Frith, 2003).
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Kindergarten Intervention | Implications
4 We refer to these children as "Less Difficult to Remediate" in comparing them to the children we characterize as "Difficult to Remediate," because although they responded more positively to first-grade intervention than did the difficult to remediate children, they did not respond as positively to the kindergarten intervention as the children in the "No Longer at Risk" groups, and were therefore more difficult to remediate than the children in the latter group.
