Poster #180 - Early skills predicting later skills in preschool: Moderating effects of chronic absenteeism

• In Event: 3-053 - Poster Session 10
  In Poster Session: PS 10 Section - School Readiness/Childcare

Integrative Statement

Introduction: Chronic absenteeism, typically defined as missing 10% or more days of school (Chang & Romero, 2008), is prevalent in the prekindergarten year and is linked to adverse child outcomes such as lags in learning, lower academic achievement, and continued chronic absenteeism in later grades (Sparks, 2010). Chronic absenteeism may impact some children more than others. For example, chronic absenteeism may be more negatively related to learning outcomes for children who enter preschool with low skill levels, as these children may need preschool instruction more than those with higher initial skill levels. In their 2014 study, Ehrlich and colleagues found that chronically-absent 4-year-old children who start preschool with lower skills in letter recognition and math fare the worst when compared to their non-chronically-absent similarly-skilled peers or more highly-skilled peers. In the present study, we seek to replicate and extend these findings with preschoolers from families with low incomes. Specifically, we examined the extent to which chronic absenteeism moderated the relation of entry level skills and spring skills in math, literacy, language, and executive function (EF).
Study Population: Participants were 452 four-year-old children from families with low incomes attending preschool throughout a Midwestern state from 2015-16 or 2016-17. Of the total sample, 48.2% were female and 89.0% lived in urban communities; 39.5% of the children were Black, 35.6% White, 12.7% Hispanic, 10.1% Multiracial, and 1.1% Asian. At the time of fall assessments, children were an average of 57.52 months old (SD = 3.64). Fifty-four percent met the benchmark for chronic absenteeism.
Methods: Children were assessed on math, literacy, language, and EF once in the fall and once in the spring of the preschool year. The assessments included: Woodcock-Johnson IV Applied Problems and Letter Word Identification subtests (WJ-IV; Schrank, McGrew, Mather, Wendling, & LaForte, 2014); Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test, fourth edition (PPVT-4; Dunn & Dunn, 2007); and the Day-Night Stroop (DNS; Gerstadt et al., 1994).
Results: Regression analyses were conducted for each academic domain, including controls for age, cohort, preschool group, race, sex, and parent income. Preliminary results indicated significant interactions with low entry skills and chronic absenteeism for literacy (b = 1.91, SE = .86, p = .03) and EF (b = -3.117, SE = 1.486, p = .04). Specifically, children who entered preschool with low literacy skills who were also chronically absent scored significantly worse in literacy than did other groups at the end of the year (see Figure 1). For children who entered preschool with high literacy skills, chronic absenteeism did not significantly impact their end of year literacy scores. Meanwhile, whereas chronic absenteeism did not seem to have an effect on EF for children who entered preschool with high EF, it did seem to have an effect on children who entered preschool with low EF. However, the pattern of findings was in the unexpected direction, such that children who entered preschool with low skills and who were chronically absent had higher EF than children who entered preschool with low skills who were not chronically absent (see Figure 2).

Authors

• Katrina Lea Schmerold, Purdue University
  Presenting Author

• Adassa Budrevich, Purdue University
  Non-Presenting Author

• James Elicker, Purdue University
  Non-Presenting Author

• David Purpura, Purdue University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Sara Schmitt, Purdue University
  Non-Presenting Author