The Impact of COVID-19 on Pre-K Children's Language and Literacy Development: Short- and Long-Term Effects

• In Event: Understanding New Approaches to Early Language and Literacy Development

Abstract

Introduction and Research Questions
In the spring of 2020, COVID-19 arrived in the United States, disrupting the education of millions of students. To date, reports the impacts on children’s learning have typically focused on elementary-aged children (e.g., Kuhfeld et al., 2022), with little information about impacts on young children whose pre-k year was interrupted by COVID-19. The present study aims to fill that gap. We ask the following research questions: 1) what are the impacts of COVID disruptions on pre-k children’s language and literacy at kindergarten entry? 2) what are the impacts of COVID on pre-K children with similar latent profiles? 3) what are the longer-term impacts of COVID on language and literacy development from pre-k to 1st grade?

Methods
The current paper draws on data collected by a large school district in west-central Florida. Florida offers pre-k to all 4-year-olds through their Voluntary Pre-K (VPK) program. Our dataset includes two cohorts of children: a pre-COVID cohort who attended VPK in 2016-2017 (n = 1,211), and the COVID cohort (VPK in 2019-2020; n = 1,167). Children in the COVID cohort missed approximately 26% of the pre-k year.
We use administrative data on children’s literacy achievement from the pre-k, kindergarten, and 1st grade year to track learning over time (respectively, VPK assessments, the Star Early Literacy assessment administered at K entry, and the Measure of Academic Progress (MAP) assessment in K and 1st). We also use child-level demographic data to control for baseline differences between cohorts.

Results
See Table 1 for descriptive information on the VPK and Star assessments. To address RQ1, we used propensity score matching (PSM; Rosenbaum & Rubin, 1983) to match COVID cohort and pre-COVID cohort children in terms of demographics and VPK scores. We then compared matched children at kindergarten entry using the Star Early Literacy assessment. Results indicated that there were no significant differences between the COVID and pre-COVID cohort in terms of language and literacy scores (β = 6.37, SE = 6.56, CI = [-6.55, 19.28]).
Using multiple group latent profile analysis (LPA), preliminary results for RQ2 found that there were four latent profiles in both the COVID and pre-COVID cohorts. In general, the latent profiles for children in the COVID vs. pre-COVID cohort were similar, but COVID children generally outperformed pre-COVID children in all domains (see Figures 1a and 1b).
We employed multiple group latent growth modeling (LGM) to investigate the longer-term impacts of COVID (RQ 3). Preliminary results for RQ3 indicate that children’s language and literacy learning trajectories in the COVID cohort appear to flatten over time as compared to the pre-COVID cohort, suggesting a delayed negative impact of COVID for children who missed a portion of their pre-k year.

Authors

• Elizabeth Burke Hadley, University of South Florida - Tampa
  Presenting Author

• Siyu Liu, University of South Florida
  Non-Presenting Author

• Meaghan McKenna, University of Kansas Medical Center
  Non-Presenting Author