Describing and Tracking Young Children’s Foundational Skills

• In Event: School Readiness: Contributions of children's individual differences during interactions in classroom and home environments

Abstract

With expansions in publicly funded early education and care (EEC), researchers and policy makers have developed a sustained interest in measuring and supporting children’s school readiness skills (Sabol & Pianta, 2017). Person-centered analyses (methods identifying subgroups of similar individuals; Johnson, 2021) are a promising approach to examining how combinations of skills manifest within individual children at school entry (Abenavoli et al., 2017; Halle et al., 2012; McWayne et al., 2012). Yet, few studies have tracked how children’s foundational skills grow and change in tandem over time or linked children’s skill profiles to contextual features that may be malleable to intervention, such as the characteristics of their EEC experiences (Sandilos et al., 2019). The present study pursues three aims addressing these research limitations:
• Aim 1: Examine profiles of children’s foundational skills at ages 3-4 and one year later;
• Aim 2: Consider stability and change across skill profiles between two time points; and
• Aim 3: Analyze associations between children’s skill profile transitions and two contextual features of EEC environments: setting type and emotional climate.
The study builds on prior literature in two key ways. First, by considering stability and change in skill sets across two academic years, it adopts a developmental lens that deepens the field’s understanding of how skills interact and change within children through the early years. Second, by considering associations between skill profiles and environmental, rather than individual, characteristics, the study examines potential targets for interventions to support children’s skill development.

The study uses data collected on 1,733 young children living in Massachusetts in 2017-18 and 2018-19 (see Table 1). Children were included in the sample if they were assessed on at least one skill at both time points. Children’s skills were measured using direct assessments that collectively capture both cognitive and social-behavioral domains: the Minnesota Executive Function Scale (executive function; Carlson & Zalazo, 2014), the Leiter-3 Examiner Rating Scale (social-behavioral skills: inattention/hyperactivity and positive emotion; Roid et al., 2013), the Quick Interactive Language Screener (language; Golinkoff et al., 2017), and the Woodcock-Johnson III Tests of Achievement Letter-Word Identification (literacy) and Applied Problems (math) subscales (Woodcock et al., 2001).

We first conducted latent profile analysis separately at each time point to identify the number of profiles present. Preliminary results indicated that there were three skill profiles at each time point and that the profiles were qualitatively similar across both years (see Figure 1). Most children in the sample clustered in one profile, representing consistently strong performance across skill areas. Consistent with Sandilos et al. (2019), social-behavioral, rather than cognitive, skills played a key role in distinguishing the profiles. Presently, we are conducting latent transition analyses to characterize stability and change in the profiles across the two time points. The final presentation will include results from these analyses, as well as from logistic regressions examining how EEC setting type and emotional climate in 2018 are associated with profile transitions, controlling background characteristics linked to children’s school readiness skills (shown in Table 1).

Authors

• Madelyn Gardner, Harvard University
  Presenting Author

• Emily Hanno, MDRC (Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation) - New York City

• Stephanie M Jones, Harvard Graduate School of Education

• Nonie Lesaux, Harvard Graduate School of Education