1. The National Early Literacy Panel: A Research Synthesis on Early Literacy Development National Association of Early Childhood Specialists/SDE Annual Meeting Anaheim CA November 9, 2004

2. Family Partnership in Reading
Coordinated by:
National Center for Family Literacy (NCFL)
Funded by:
National Institute for Literacy (NIFL)
In consultation with:
National Institute for Child Health and Human Development (NICHD)
U.S. Department of Education
Head Start Bureau, Department of Health and Human Services
Coordinated by:

3. Family Partnership in Reading
Create and disseminate professional development materials for programs providing family literacy services that summarize the scientific reading research.

4. Instructional strategies will be identified based on the scientific research that will enable staff in Head Start, Even Start and other programs providing family literacy services to:
Help young children develop the foundational
skills they need to become good readers,
Equip parents to support their children’s
literacy development, and
Improve reading instruction for parents in
family literacy programs.

5. Family Partnership in Reading
Task 1: Identify and support a panel of researchers to synthesize the findings of scientific research studies on early literacy development in children, ages 0-5, including parental and home effects on that development.
Task 2: Identify instructional strategies to help children, ages 0-5, and in kindergarten through grade three to learn to read.

6. Family Partnership in Reading
Task 3: Create and provide professional development and materials on the findings of scientific literature about how adults learn to read and how parents and caregivers can help children learn to read.
Task 4: Develop a plan for piloting the professional development components and materials from Tasks 1, 2, and 3 that leads to full-scale implementation into NCFL’s family literacy training.

7. Dr. Timothy Shanahan (Chair), University of Illinois at Chicago
Dr. Anne Cunningham, University of California at Berkeley
Dr. Christopher J. Lonigan, Florida State University
Dr. Kathy Escamilla, University of Colorado at Boulder
Dr. Victoria Molfese, University of Louisville
Dr. Janet Fischel, State University of New York at Stony Brook
Dr. Chris Schatschneider, Florida State University
Dr. Susan H. Landry, University of Texas—Houston
Dr. Dorothy Strickland, Rutgers University

8. Background
Increase the use of research as the basis for educational decision-making and debate
Report of the National Reading Panel
Need for comparable information on early literacy and family literacy

9. Benefits for Instruction
Help children develop the foundational skills they need to become good readers
Equip parents to support their children’s literacy development

10. Benefits of a Research Synthesis
The aggregation of research allows for an accounting and weighing of research evidence in support of a research question.

11. Multiple studies will employ different methods and different measures which should increase the robustness of a particular finding
Research syntheses can provide a rich source of ideas for needed research.

12. Limits to a Research Synthesis
Limited most by the availability and quality of research on a particular question. Generalizations made from a synthesis must stay within the bounds of the research.

13. Questions Addressed by the
Overview of the
Questions Addressed by the
Research Synthesis

14. Four Synthesis Questions

15. 1. What are young children’s (ages birth through five years) skills and abilities that predict later reading, writing and spelling outcomes?
2. What environments and settings contribute to or inhibit gains in children’s skills and abilities and are linked to later outcomes in reading, writing and spelling?
3. What child characteristics contribute to or inhibit gains in children’s skills and abilities and are linked to later outcomes in reading, writing and spelling?
4. What programs and interventions contribute to or inhibit gains in children’s skills and abilities and are linked to later outcomes in reading, writing and spelling?

16. Synthesis Questions
What programs and interventions contribute to or inhibit gains in children’s skills and abilities and are linked to later outcomes in reading, writing and spelling?

17. Synthesis Questions
What are the skills and abilities that are linked to later outcomes in reading, writing and spelling?

18. Emergent Literacy
Emergent literacy involves the skills, knowledge, and attitudes that are developmental precursors to conventional forms of reading and writing (Whitehurst & Lonigan, 1998).

19. Emergent Literacy
Emergent literacy skills are the basic building blocks for learning to read and write.

20. Emergent Literacy
Interventions in the preschool period need to focus on emergent literacy skills because children are not yet engaging in conventional forms of literacy.

21. Emergent Literacy
Questions that need to be answered about emergent literacy interventions:
What skills constitute the domain of emergent literacy?
What are effective ways to intervene on those skills?
Are these skills necessary to develop conventional literacy skills (if not, why not just teach conventional literacy skills)?

22. What skills constitute the domain of conventional literacy skills?
Emergent Literacy
What skills constitute the domain of conventional literacy skills?
Receptively
Decoding (accuracy and fluency)
Reading Comprehension

23. What skills constitute the domain of conventional literacy skills?
Emergent Literacy
What skills constitute the domain of conventional literacy skills?
Although decoding is not all there is to skilled reading, it is a critical component.
You can decode what you cannot comprehend, but…
you cannot comprehend what you cannot decode.

24. What skills constitute the domain of conventional literacy skills?
Emergent Literacy
What skills constitute the domain of conventional literacy skills?
Expressively
Spelling
Composition

25. How to define emergent literacy
Two conditions need to be satisfied for something to be considered an emergent literacy skill:
(a) Must come before conventional literacy skills.
(b) Must be related to (i.e., predictive of) conventional literacy skills.

26. Identifying Emergent Literacy Skills
Many candidate emergent literacy skills have been suggested, including
oral language
concepts about print
environmental print
alphabet knowledge
phonological processing skills
visual-perceptual skills
emergent (pretend) reading
emergent (pretend) writing

27. Identifying Emergent Literacy Skills:
The Evidence

28. Identifying the Studies for RQ1
Using a list of search terms in nine categories, electronic searches in both PsychINFO and ERIC were conducted
6700 citations were generated

29. These 6700 publications were screened against initial criteria
Published in English
Published in a refereed journal
Empirical research
Include children between the ages of 0 and 5 or kindergarten children

30. 1825 studies passed this initial screening and abstracts were reviewed for relevance.
685 studies passed this second screen and full text articles reviewed for relevance.

31. 275 passed the full text review.
41 of the 275 were later rejected because of insufficient information to code.
All effect sizes in these 234 studies were coded and summarized.

32. These 234 studies involved a predictive relation between a skill measured during preschool and a convention literacy outcome measured at some later point in time (i.e., from kindergarten forward).

33. Resulting in...

34. Predictors of Decoding

35. More Predictors of Decoding

37. Predictors of Reading Comprehension

39. Predictors of Spelling

41. Identifying Emergent Literacy Skills
Within meta-analyses, there must be a minimum of three studies contributing an effect size to allow interpretation.
Correlations of .30 or higher mean that at least 9 percent of the variance in a conventional literacy outcome can be predicted from the emergent literacy variable.

42. A number of variables have strong and consistent relations with later convention literacy outcomes in a relatively large number of studies with a relatively large number of children (meaning they are sizable, reliable, and stable):

43. Strong Predictors:
Alphabet Knowledge
Concepts About Print
Phonological Awareness
Invented Spelling
Oral Language
Writing Name
RAN (Rapid Automatic Naming/Lexical Access)

44. Other variables have a smaller effect or have been examined in fewer studies with fewer children:
Phonological STM
Visual Motor Skills
Visual Perceptual Skills

45. Variables that are not in the table have not yet been demonstrated to be predictive of later conventional literacy skills.
A very important interpretive caution for these findings is that these values reflect zero-order correlations.
Correlations may reflect third variables.
Variables may share predictive variance.

46. Greater confidence of the importance of a variable would be obtained if that variable contributed unique predictive variance to an outcome once other important variables were controlled.
For example, does a variable predict a reading outcome above and beyond variance shared with IQ or language skill?

47. Examination of multivariate studies (i. e
Examination of multivariate studies (i.e., studies in which the predictive utility of variables is examined in the context of other variables) indicates that several of these univariate predictors provide independent predictive information.

48. Unique predictors from the multivariate
studies
Alphabet Knowledge
Phonological Sensitivity
Invented Spelling
Oral Language

49. Some Finer-Grained Questions:
Does Age of Assessment Matter?
Does Age of Outcome Matter?
Does Type of PA Skill Matter?
Does Type of Oral Language Skill Matter?
Does Type of Memory Matter?

50. NELP RQ4 Process

51. Criteria for evaluating research studies
The primary research studies set the limits for what we can conclude in our research synthesis.
The primary studies can be evaluated on a number of criteria. One is in how much causal information that they carry.

52. What allows the determination of a cause and effect relationship?
The cause must precede the effect
The cause must be related to the effect
We can find no other plausible alternative explanation for the effect other than the cause.

53. Correlational studies
Cause and Effect
Research studies vary in their ability to address cause and effect relationships
Studies can be placed in a general hierarchy according to how much causal information they can provide
Experiments
Quasi-experiments
Correlational studies

54. `
Panelists (in pairs) reviewed abstracts from the list of 1825 that resulted from the original screen of 6700 abstracts (original search). This review resulted in the retrieval of 651 articles for panelist review. Purpose was to retrieve any intervention studies that fit the original criteria for inclusion.

55. `
Using the results of RQ1 analyses, 13 predictors were used as search categories (with terms identified for each category) along with terms in age and intervention categories to conduct a search for interventions that tested the predictor variables. This search resulted in 840 abstracts that were reviewed by panelists. From this review 280 articles were retrieved.

56. `
As articles were retrieved they were categorized by intervention type.
Categories identified:

57. `
Category 1: Helping Children Make Sense of Print--Cracking the Alphabetic Code and Teaching Letters and Words (PA, Letter Knowledge, Spelling, Phonics, Print Awareness, Visual Perceptual/Perceptual Motor)

58. ` Category 2: Reading to and Sharing Books with Young Children
Category 3: Parent and Home Programs for Improving Young Children’s Literacy

59. ` Category 4: Preschool and Kindergarten Programs
Category 5: Language Enhancement Studies

60. `
Studies were reviewed and coded according to the screening criteria and items related to research design.

61. Factors in RQ4 Study Review
Intervention Research
Group Design
RCT versus Quasi-experimental
Not Confounded
Appropriate controls in quasi-experimental studies

62. `
Currently, number of studies (total = 168) included for RQ4 and their respective categories are:
Category 1: 51 studies
Category 2: 24 studies
Category 3: 27 studies
Category 4: 39 studies
Category 5: 27 studies

63. Oral Language Interventions
Numerous studies on the efficacy of oral language interventions.
However, few have followed children to the point where effects could be seen on reading outcome variables.

64. Oral Language Interventions
Domain of studies that have examined the efficacy of various oral language interventions is large.
This summary is restricted to those interventions that have focused on a literacy context.

65. Oral Language Interventions
All forms of interactive shared reading interventions produce positive effects on children’s oral language skills as measured by standardized tests and more natural language samples.
These interventions require children to respond and incorporate a scaffolding approach.

66. Oral Language Interventions
Effective agents of intervention can be teachers, parents, community volunteers, or teacher aides.
Effects are obtained with children selected for risk status and unselected children.

67. Oral Language Interventions
Notably, the single study that followed children into the first grade did not find any impact of the successful oral language intervention on children’s decoding skills--highlighting the modularity of emergent literacy skills.

68. Phonological Awareness Interventions

69. Phonological Awareness Interventions
There is a large literature on the effects of teaching phonological sensitivity to children and its impact on reading skills.
These data indicate that training phonological skills is effective and has a significant impact on decoding skills. Indeed, these data indicate that phonological skills are causally related to reading skills.

70. Phonological Awareness Interventions
The majority of these data, however, come from studies of children in the first grade or older.
A search of the published evidence yielded approximately 55 studies of phonological sensitivity interventions with children who were in kindergarten or preschool.
Of these, only 6 studies included primarily children who were preschool age.

71. Phonological Awareness Interventions
Byrne and Fielding-Barnsley have reported the most comprehensive examination of a preschool phonological sensitivity intervention.
Their intervention involved teaching children to identify initial phonemes in words by matching words on the basis of initial sounds.

72. Phonological Awareness Interventions
Approximately 6 hours of exposure to this program, conducted by the experimenters, resulted in effects on reading skills that persisted for 6 years.
A trial of the same program, but implemented by preschool teachers, also yielded positive immediate results; however, the overall size of the effect was not as large as that obtained in the experimenter implemented program.

73. Print Knowledge Interventions

74. Print Knowledge Interventions
There are relatively few studies examining the effect of training children in print knowledge.
In her review of the literature, Adams (1990) noted that there was little evidence that teaching children the alphabet had an impact on later reading.
Perhaps this conclusion has limited investigations of the impact of print knowledge interventions.

75. Print Knowledge Interventions
The majority of studies involving the teaching of letters have been done in the context of training phonological sensitivity with older children (i.e., Kindergarten or above).
Data from these studies provide evidence that training children in both phonological sensitivity and letter knowledge is more effective than training in phonological sensitivity alone

76. Print Knowledge Interventions
One recent short-term study did find an effect on reading of training letter knowledge.
Children trained to recognize letter names were more able to decode phonetically spelled words than children exposed to a comprehension training.
However, the letter group also received PA training.

77. Implications for Early Childhood Education

78. Provides evidence for building children’s language and literacy skills in the preschool period.
Identifies early skills that give children the strongest foundation for learning to read.
Informs decisions about developing or selecting the most appropriate curricula (e.g., content, intensity, sequence).

79. Provides guidelines for professional development (e. g
Provides guidelines for professional development (e.g., read-aloud practices, PA activities).
Supports the importance of assessment of early literacy skills.

80. Helps to guide the development of goals and selection of content for parent programs.
Provides strong direction about future research.