One Year of Growth in the Knowledge and Skills of Preschoolers With Disabilities

• In school year 2003-04, children who received preschool special education services performed close to the average performance of their peers without disabilities on the Woodcock-Johnson III: Letter-Word Identification subtest, with an overall mean performance of 98.2. In school year 2004-05, the mean overall performance increased significantly to 100.2. Mean performance increased significantly for all three age cohorts, for both males and females, for children identified as having a developmental delay, and for children identified as having a speech or language impairment.
• Overall, children who received preschool special education services performed similarly on the PPVT in 2003-04 and 2004-05. The only significant increase in performance on the PPVT was by children identified as having a low-incidence disability, with a mean of 85.2 in 2003- 04 and of 90.0 in 2004-05.
• On the Woodcock-Johnson III: Applied Problems subtest, the mean performance of children who received preschool special education services was 90.8 in school year 2003-04. This performance increased significantly to a mean of 91.9 in 2004-05. There were significant increases for children in Cohort A and Cohort C, for males, and for children identified as having the following primary disabilities: developmental delay, learning disability, speech or language impairment, and low-incidence disability.
• Children in Cohort C had a significant increase in performance on the Woodcock-Johnson III: Quantitative Concepts subtest, from 90.9 in 2003-04 to 93.9 in 2004-05. This is the only cohort for which 2 years of data were available for this test.
• Mean teacher ratings on the Preschool and Kindergarten Behavior Scales 2 (PKBS-2) – Social Skills scale for children who received special education services increased significantly from 92.9 in school year 2003-04 to 96.0 in school year 2004-05. There were significant increases for males and females and for children in Cohort A and Cohort B. This scale of the PKBS-2 assesses skills such as "works or plays independently" and "comforts other children who are upset." Children identified as having a developmental delay and children identified as having a speech or language impairment had a significant increase.
• The mean score on the Fine Motor and Gross Motor subscales from the Vineland Adaptive Behavior Scales, Classroom Edition, increased from 94.4 in school year 2003-04 to 96.2 in 2004-05. There were significant increases for children in Cohort A and Cohort C, for males, for children identified as having a learning disability, and for children identified as having a developmental delay.
• Alternate assessments were completed for children who were not capable of participating in the direct assessment or who scored very low on the two English-language subtests that were included in the direct assessment. An alternate assessment was completed for 12 percent of the children in the sample in Wave 1 and 7 percent of the children in the sample in Wave 2. Not all of the children for whom an alternate was completed in Wave 1 also had an alternate completed for them in Wave 2 and vice versa; thus the alternate assessment data for Waves 1 and 2 reflect somewhat different samples. Overall, scores for children for whom an alternate assessment was completed were more than one standard deviation below the population mean for each of the skill areas measured by the Adaptive Behavior Assessment System-II (ABASII); in most cases, scores were more than two standard deviations below the population mean.

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