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Intervention: Let'sBegin with the Letter People®

Overview1

Let's Begin with the Letter People® is an early education curriculum that uses thematic units to develop children's language and literacy skills. A major focus is phonological awareness, including rhyming, word play, alliteration, and segmentation. Children are encouraged to learn as individuals, in small groups, and in a whole-class environment. Both cognitive and socio-emotional development are presented as keys to learning.

Research

Two studies of Let’s Begin with the Letter People® met the What Works Clearinghouse (WWC) evidence standards.2 These two studies included 103 classrooms from various preschool settings in Texas and southeastern New York. This report focuses on immediate posttest findings to determine the effectiveness of the intervention.3 The WWC considers the extent of evidence for Let’s Begin with the Letter People® to be medium to large for oral language and for print knowledge and small for phonological processing. No studies that met WWC evidence standards with or without reservations addressed early reading/writing, cognition, or math.

Effectiveness

Let’s Begin with the Letter People® was found to have no discernible effects on oral language and potentially positive effects on print knowledge and phonological processing.

  Oral language Print knowledge Phonological processing Early reading/ writing Cognition Math
Rating of effectiveness No discernible effects Potentially postive effects Potentially postive effects na na na
Improvement index4 Average: +1 percentile point
Range: –1 to +3 percentile points		 Average: +10 percentile points
Range: +5 to +12 percentile points		 Average: +15 percentile points
Range: +8 to +21 percentile points		 na na na
na = not applicable
1 The descriptive information for this program was obtained from publicly available sources: the program’s website (http://www.abramsandcompany.com/lets_begin_with_letter_people.aspx, downloaded April 17, 2007) and the research literature (Assel, Landry, Swank, & Gunnewig, 2006; Fischel, Bracken, Fuchs-Eisenberg, Spira, Katz, & Shaller, in press). The WWC requests developers to review the program description sections for accuracy from their perspective. Further verification of the accuracy of the descriptive information for this program is beyond the scope of this review.
2 To be eligible for the WWC’s review, the Early Childhood Education (ECE) intervention had to be implemented in English in center-based settings with children aged three to five or in preschool.
3 The evidence presented in this report is based on available research. Findings and conclusions may change as new research becomes available. Let’s Begin with the Letter People® is being studied under the Preschool Curriculum Evaluation Research (PCER) Grants administered through the U. S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences. The final PCER reports were not released in time to be reviewed for this report.
4 These numbers show the average and range of student-level improvement indices for all findings across the studies.