School Readiness: What We Know and What We Need to Know

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School Readiness What We Know and What We Need
to Know

• Barbara Dillon Goodson

A Presentation at the 4th Annual IES Research
Conference June 7, 2009 Washington, DC
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Talking about school readiness again

• Discussion has been going on since the 1990s
• At that time, focus was on broadening the
  definition of readiness to more domains
• Definition based more on theory about what skills
  children need to have at kindergarten entry so as
  to be successful in school
• No specification of levels of skills needed
• No specified system of measurement

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Whats changed in last 20 years

• Heightened concern about differential in school
  readiness between children from higher vs lower
  resource families the school readiness gap
• Evidence of substantial proportion of children
  who fail to become skilled readers by 3rd grade

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Whats changed in last 20 years

• Pressure on early care and education to
  demonstrate capacity to enhance childrens
  development and make them ready for school
• In the late 1990s, the federal government began
  to fund a substantial body of research to expand
  knowledge about interventions programs/curricula
  that are effective at improving school readiness
• Special focus on at-risk children from low-income
  families
• Is a growing body of research testing
  effectiveness of early childhood interventions

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Examples of federally-funded research

• Congressionally-mandated evaluations of Federal
  early childhood programs using rigorous designs--
  Head Start, Early Head Start, Early Reading
  First, Even Start  
• IES-funded Preschool Curriculum Evaluation and
  Research (PCER) with 13 randomized studies of
  selected off-the-shelf curricula
• IES grants on early childhood intervention
  strategiesdevelopment of interventions, followed
  by efficacy and effectiveness studies

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Examples of federally-funded research

• Interagency School Readiness Consortium (ISRC)
  (NICHD, ACF, ASPE, OSERS with 8 randomized
  studies of newly developed school readiness
  interventions that have integrated focus on
  cognitive, literacy, and socioemotional aspects
  of development
• The Head Start Classroom-based Approaches and
  Resources for Emotion and Social Skill Promotion
  (CARES) Project tests 4 evidence-based strategies
  to improve childrens social and emotional
  development

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Examples of federally-funded research

• 3 national studies of interventions for children
  in home-based care tested effectiveness of
  different provider training models in enhancing
  the quality of family child care and promoting
  positive child outcomes
• Quality Interventions for Early Care and
  Education (QUINCE) (ACF ASPE) tested 2
  strategies for increasing quality based on
  coaching
• Evaluation of Child Care Subsidy Strategies (ACF)
  tested effectiveness of LearningGames curriculum

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Overall results

• Curriculum interventions to promote outcomes for
  language/early literacy, math, emotion knowledge
  and behavioral regulation
• For completed research, impacts range
  widely--none to small to moderate
• Findings dont tell us much about active
  ingredients which specific instructional
  methods are responsible
• Influence of design elements

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Other funded research on curricula, approaches

• Studies of curricula to promote language and
  literacy outcomes
• National Early Literacy Panel provides summary of
  rigorous studies
• Small to moderate impacts on oral language
  outcomes
• Mostly non-significant effects on phonological
  awareness although a few moderate-large effects
• Moderate to large effects on print knowledge

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Other funded research on curricula, approaches

• Studies of curricula to promote social-emotional
  development
• Small to moderate impacts on attention,
  engagement, focused effort assessed directly
• Small to moderate impacts on social problem
  solving, emotion knowledge

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Other funded research on curricula, approaches

• Studies of curricula to promote math learning
• Moderate to large impacts on math outcomes
• Curricula approach early math as a broad array of
  topics, including number, measurement, space,
  shape and pattern

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Critical issues remain

• Definitional issues
• What do we really mean by school readiness?
• How can we measure it?
• School readiness gap

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Understanding the school readiness gap

• What is the school readiness gap? Is it
  different for different domains?
• Is closing the gap necessary to prepare children
  for school success?
• Have we designed interventions that close the
  gap? How long does it take?
• Is there a critical period for closing the gap?
• Is closing the gap sufficient--if we reduce or
  even close the gap, will we fix the achievement
  problem?

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Defining and measuring school readiness

• Need to build an infrastructure to guide and
  link research and policy
• Identifying the skills/outcomes for children that
  are most important to academic success
• Identifying indicators for these outcomes at the
  end of preschool (indicators of school
  readiness)
• Selecting measures of these indicators

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Skills leading to academic success

• Focus on academic success
• Goal is for students to attain proficiency in
  academic areas
• Assumption that it is not enough to decrease
  involvement with crime, increase employment
• Type of employment makes a difference
• Meaning of outcomes changes over time

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Indicators that stand for school readiness

• Indicators may need to focus on a few
  measureable, agreed-on skills
• Indicators will not include everything we think
  is important for children
• Some things that we think are important for
  children arent criteria for school readiness
• Some things that appear to interest and engage
  young children havent been shown to predict
  later achievement

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Indicators that stand for school readiness

• Three indicators appear to be critical
• Language development (large vocabulary with
  understanding of the meaning of words, semantic
  network of concepts)
• Cognitive self-regulation (control over
  attention, focus, self-evaluation)
• Early literacy (print knowledge, phonological
  sensitivity)

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Measuring these indicators

• Language development
• Standardized measure of expressive vocabulary
• Both language for dual language learners
• Early literacy
• Knowledge of shape and sound of letters of
  alphabet
• Ability to manipulate soundselision/blending

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Measuring these indicators

• Cognitive self-regulation
• Most difficult to measure
• Tasks assessing ability to act/hold back
  (Head-Toes-Knees-Shoulders)
• Computerized tests of persistence (continuous
  performance)
• Computerized tests of responding/not responding
  when visual prompts appear

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Crucial role of an infrastructure

• Infrastructure will help us make sense of
  research on research on impacts of preschool
  interventions
• To understand which instructional strategies are
  more/most effective, need to compare effects of
  different intervention strategies on same
  outcomes
• Allows us to address questions about whether
  focusing on one indicator (e.g., self-regulation)
  has generalized impacts across other indicators

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Crucial role of an infrastructure

• Need to build a systematic knowledge base on
  effective practices-- a science of practice--
  for promoting school readiness
• What are the potent factors in promoting school
  readiness--sometimes called active ingredients

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Why Do We Need These

• Studies of the effects of early childhood
  interventions are not connected by a consistent
  definition of what constitutes school readiness
• Studies tend to use measures that align with the
  intervention and do not attempt to assess a more
  comprehensive set of outcomes across other
  domains
• .

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The School Readiness Gap

• The reality of a school readiness gap for at-risk
  children
• There are significant differences in childrens
  skills when they enter kindergarten
• This is important when gap occurs in skill areas
  considered to be crucial foundational skills for
  school success
• .

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The School Readiness Gap

• Discussion and analysis of gap have focused on
  precursors to reading proficiency
• Why focus on language and reading?
• Limited measurement and intervention in other
  areas
• Reading can be measured by standardized tests
  that support variety of analyses
• Reading widely-accepted as foundation skill
  crucial to school success across content areas
• Children who enter school without these skills
  may not catch up
• .

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The School Readiness Gap

• Recognition that gap is multi-faceted
• Physical (more asthma, dental disease)
• Socio-emotional (more behavioral problems)
• .

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The School Readiness Gap

• Gap associated with socioeconomic status
• In ECLS-K data, cognitive scores among children
  in the highest SES group are 60 higher than
  those of children in the lowest SES group (Lee
  Burkam, 2002)
• FACES study of children in Head Start documents
  school readiness gap between children at the end
  of Head Start and national norms (ACF, 2006)
• .

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Evidence of language achievement gap

• CCDP
• Children more than .5 s.d. behind on receptive
  vocabulary at 3 years
• Gap increases to 1 s.d. by 5 years of age
• Even Start
• Children more than .5 s.d. behind on receptive
  vocabulary at 3 years
• Gap increases to .8 s.d. by 5 years of age
• .

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Growth Trajectories of Two Groups of Children
Mean at Each Measurement Point for Full Sample
(top black) and Children in Repeat Poverty
(bottom orange)
Children whose families are in repeated poverty
(poverty at the time of the Fall K test and
poverty at one or more subsequent measurement
points).
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Investigating the Gap with ECLS-K

• Analyses of ECLS-K longitudinal data on
  pre-reading/reading test (Layzer Price, 2008)
• Fall kindergarten IRT scaled scores used to sort
  children into deciles
• IRT scaled scores at four subsequent time points
  used to construct growth models for each decile

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Growth Trajectories for Fall Kindergarten Reading
Score
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Growth Trajectories for Letter Recognition
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Growth Trajectories for Phonological Awareness
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Growth Trajectories for Extrapolation
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Conclusions from ECLS-K graphs

• Children catch up on letters (spring of 1st
  grade) and sounds (spring of 3rd grade)
• Children do not catch up on comprehension of text
• There is no point short of closing the gap that
  prepares children adequately for reading (and, as
  a corollary, for school success)

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Have the interventions closed the gap

• Recent summary papers suggest an increasing
  variety of types of early childhood education
  interventions and curricula are effective at
  improving childrens outcomes across domains.
• Size of impacts suggest that our interventions
  can close some but not all of the gap
• Possible it takes more than one year to close gap
• .

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What We Learn from Research on Intervention
Effects

• On one hand, ECLS-K data suggest that children
  who start out with large gaps in language skills
  may not catch up
• Conversely, data on effective middle/high schools
  suggests that even with students with history of
  poor academic performance, possible to change
  student outcomes .
• .

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Will closing the gap solve the problem

• If we could actually close the gap, will we fix
  the achievement problem?
• Possible that readiness skills are only part of
  what makes students succeed we dont know what
  is involved in school achievement
• Will not know this until we have successfully
  closed the gap for a large number of at-risk
  preschoolers and see how they do in school
• For now, assume closing the gap is necessary if
  not sufficient

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Increasing pressure to measure school readiness

• State education departments want to be able to
  track progress of children state-wide
• For program planning
• To help them understand/demonstrate effects of
  policies
• Responsibility of researchers to the field to
  take on task of proposing a small set of school
  readiness indicators and how they are to be
  measured