Journal of Educational Psychology, Vol 115(8), Nov 2023, 1045-1069; doi:10.1037/edu0000814
Significant attention and legislation have been directed to assessment intervention for students with word-level reading disability (WLRD; i.e., dyslexia). Scholars have called for similar attention to prevention-oriented approaches in which intervention is provided to students at risk for WLRD from the earliest grades. Progress monitoring is a key aspect of early intervention, and although numerous measures exist for monitoring kindergarten reading development across foundational skill areas, little evidence indicates which measure(s) provide data that best reflect progress toward successful reading outcomes or significant word reading difficulties. In this study, a sample of 426 ethnically and linguistically diverse kindergarten students, considered at-risk for reading difficulties at the start of kindergarten, were monitored across kindergarten with seven measures that included tests of letter name and sound fluency, phoneme segmentation, word and pseudoword reading, and a computer adaptive test. Students’ word reading skills were assessed at the end of kindergarten and first grade with standardized tests of word reading, pseudoword decoding, and oral reading. Analyses that included latent variable growth modeling (controlling for emergent bilingual status) and latent profile analyses found that growth in letter-sound fluency during the fall of kindergarten, and word reading fluency during the spring, were the most strongly related to subsequent word reading skills and most clearly distinguished a subgroup of students who demonstrated significant word reading difficulties by the end of first grade. These measures may be ideal indices of progress for low-performing kindergarteners and for signaling a need for intervention intensification within a prevention-oriented framework. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved)