Summary
Results from the present study extend results from the first grade intervention study conducted by Vellutino et al., (1996) and provide additional support for their contention that early and long-term reading difficulties in most children are caused primarily by experiential and instructional factors rather than biologically based cognitive deficits. In both studies, children who experienced early literacy difficulties entered kindergarten lacking in foundational literacy skills and were, therefore, at risk for early and long-term literacy difficulties. But, whereas in the Vellutino et al., (1996) study, children who experienced early literacy difficulties were identified in mid-first grade and received one-to-one remedial tutoring for one or two school terms (depending on need), in the present study, children at risk for early reading difficulties were identified at the beginning of kindergarten and received either kindergarten (small group) intervention alone or both kindergarten and first grade (one-to-one) intervention for most of each school year. Because the majority of children who received some form of kindergarten intervention generally performed better than children who did not receive any kindergarten intervention on measures of emergent literacy skills and because these children were found to be no longer at risk in first grade and beyond, we suggest that early identification of at risk children in kindergarten and early intervention to institute foundational literacy skills in such children is an efficient strategy for making a "first cut" distinction between experientially and biologically based causes of early reading difficulties. This suggestion is supported by the finding that children who received both kindergarten and first grade intervention and who, by definition, were difficult to remediate, were also found to have weaker cognitive profiles than either normally achieving readers or children whose emergent literacy difficulties were remediated in kindergarten and were no longer at risk in first grade. This finding is analogous to Vellutino et al.'s, (1996) finding that impaired readers who continued to perform below average on tests of reading achievement, even after two semesters of one-to-one tutoring, had weaker cognitive profiles than either normally achieving readers or children who became independent readers after only one semester of one-to-one tutoring.
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Implications | Acknowledgements
