The Prediction of Reading Skills From Pre-reading Skills

My colleagues at Stony Brook have recently completed a multi-year longitudinal study aimed in part at determining how reading skills in elementary school were determined by preschool cognitive abilities. We followed the literacy outcomes of children attending Head Start, the federal preschool program for children in poverty. The study involved about 600 children who were first encountered as they entered Head Start as four-year-olds. We followed these children annually through the end of elementary school. Each year we assessed the children on a large number of measures of pre-reading, and later, literacy skills.

We used a fancy statistical technique called structural equation modeling to understand the data we collected. I won't bore you with the details of it here, but it is a powerful way of examining causal influences in development.

The most important finding from our study was that inside-out skills in the pre-K and kindergarten period such a letter knowledge and phonological sensitivity were much stronger influences on reading achievement in Grades 1 and 2 than were outside-in abilities such as vocabulary. Conceptual and vocabulary skills come to be important in later elementary grades once children have cracked the alphabetic code and are reading for understanding, but early on its inside-out pre-reading skills that determine reading outcomes. One way to illustrate this statistically is that we could predict which kids in our sample would be poor readers in 2nd grade with above 80% accuracy from their inside-out skills at exit from Head Start.

What does this mean? It means that children need to develop phonological sensitivity, need to know their letters, how to write their names, and how print works before they start school. Children who have acquired these inside-out skills are going to have many fewer reading problems in elementary school than children who do not have these abilities.

It is important to note that the ability of this model to predict outcomes for these children, who are all from low-income families, means that there are very substantial differences among these children and their families. Some do well. Some don't. The positive message is that having a low family income does not in and of itself mean that children will have low levels of pre-reading ability, or low levels of language interaction, or poor reading outcomes. None of the experiences that are important in developing reading abilities are exclusive to the middle class. They occur in many low-income families, and should occur more frequently in a lot of families across the socio-economic spectrum.

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