Technical Examination of a Measure of Phonological Sensitivity (original) (raw)
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Assessing phonological awareness in kindergarten children: Issues of task comparability
Journal of Experimental …, 1984
Ten different phonological awareness tasks were administered to a group of kindergarten children whose reading ability was assessed 1 year later. The extraneous cognitive requirements inherent in the tasks varied widely. The children's performance on three tasks that involved a rhyming response was at ceiling, and these tasks did not correlate with subsequent reading progress. The other seven measures were all moderately related to later reading ability and, employed in sets, were very strong predictors. The relative predictive accuracy of the phonological tasks was equal to or better than more global measures of cognitive skills such as an intelligence test and a reading readiness test. The phonological tasks had a large amount of common variance. Factor analysis revealed only one factor on which all the nonrhyming phonological tasks loaded highly. The results bolster the construct validity of phonological awareness, indicate considerable comparability and interchangeability among the tasks used to measure the construct, and are encouraging as regards the possible use of such tasks in predictive test batteries.
Screening of phonological awareness in the early elementary grades: an IRT approach
Annals of Dyslexia, 2007
The purpose of the present study was to explore the possibilities for the assessment of growth in phonological awareness of children in kindergarten and first grade. Phonological awareness was measured using four sets of items involving rhyming, phoneme identification, phoneme blending, and phoneme segmentation. The results of an exploratory factor analysis and analyses conducted within the framework of item response theory showed one latent ability to underlie the different sets of items, which nevertheless differed in difficulty. Analyses in terms of the children’s ability further showed the phonological awareness measures to be sensitive to growth. The amount of information supplied by the different sets of items depended on the children’s level of ability. The conclusion that it is possible to accurately monitor the development of children’s phonological awareness in the early elementary grades appears to be justified, and this possibility opens up new perspectives for the early screening for reading problems and dyslexia.
Revista CEFAC, 2019
Objective: to provide preliminary normative data for the Reading and Writing Test by type of school, and normative data for the Phonological Awareness Test by Oral Production for private schools and update their normative data available for public schools, all of which are for children in the final year of early childhood education. Methods: 267 children, in the age range of 5 years, and typical development. Identification Questionnaire for Parents, Phonological Awareness Test by Oral Production and Reading and Writing Test were used. The means of performance in the tests of the present sample were compared with the existing normative data to justify normative data provision and updating. Results: student's t-test revealed that the private school children outperformed those of the public schools in all measures, reinforcing the need for specific standards, according to the type of school. There were strong to very strong relationships among the variables evaluated, demonstrating a marked association between phonological awareness and initial reading and writing abilities. The Wilcoxon test revealed significant differences between the performance of the children of the present study, from both private and public schools, and the data from the Phonological Awareness Test by Oral Production standardization sample, suggesting the need to update the Phonological Awareness Test by Oral Production standards. Finally, the new normative data were presented. Conclusion: the need to make available and update the test standards used, according to the type of school, was confirmed. Further studies are necessary to expand the data presented to other age groups.
Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 2002
Phonological sensitivity is an important causal variable in reading acquisition; however, there is controversy concerning its nature. One view holds that sensitivity to various linguistic units reflects independent abilities, whereas another holds sensitivity to these units reflects one ability. We examined relations among sensitivity to words, syllables, rhymes, and phonemes in 149 older preschool children (4-and 5-year-olds) and 109 younger preschool children (2-and 3-year-olds) who completed eight measures of phonological sensitivity and measures of print knowledge. Confirmatory factor analyses of all combinations of word, syllable, rhyme, and phoneme factors found that a one-factor model best explained the data from both groups of children (CFIs Ͼ .98). Only variance common to all phonological sensitivity skills was related to print knowledge and rudimentary decoding. Findings support a developmental conceptualization of phonological sensitivity. © 2002 Elsevier Science (USA)
Phonological awareness as a predictor of early reading achievement
Early prediction of difficulty with learning to read is central to the development of instructional efforts aimed at preventing reading failure. Phonological awareness seems to be such an early predictor. In a previous study (Speidel and Power, 1987) with end-of-kindergarten children of Hawaiian ancestry, who speak a creole of English, familiarity with standard English was an excellent predictor of end-of-first-grade reading success, short- term memory a moderate predictor, while phonological awareness was useless as a predictor, since few children were able to complete the task. The present study looks at the development of phonological awareness in Hawaiian first grade students and its relationship to end-of-first grade reading achievement. The findings a) supported the earlier observation that phonological awareness develops relatively late in Hawaiian children, b) showed that phonological awareness is an excellent predictor of reading success among Hawaiian children, and c) suggested that the use of "thoughtful" phonics instruction together with whole language activities fosters the development of both phonological awareness and reading achievement.
The development of phonological awareness among preschoolers
Early Child Development and Care, 2019
The phonological awareness (PA) skills represent a major milestone in the development of reading abilities for preschool children. The purpose of this research study was to examine the developmental trajectories of preschoolers' PA. A related purpose was to explore gender differences in PA. Participants in this study were 767 preschool children (336 males and 431 females) with 249 children in KG1 and 518 children in KG2. These children were randomly selected from a pool of 16 private preschools across the capital of Oman, Muscat. A battery of PA tasks were adapted from the Phonological Awareness Test-Second Edition (PAT-2; [Robertson, C., & Salter, W. (2007). The phonological awareness test 2 (PAT 2). Austin, TX: PRO-ED.]) and the Comprehensive Test of Phonological Processing-Second Edition (CTOPP-2; [Wagner, R., Torgesen, J., Rashotte, C., & Pearson, N. (2012). Comprehensive test of phonological processing (2nd ed.). Austin, TX: Pro-Ed.]). The PA tasks consisted of 19 subtests: rhyming discrimination, rhyming production, syllables segmentation, phoneme segmentation, isolation (firs, medial, and last sound), compound words deletion and phonemes deletion, sound matching (first and last sound), blending words, memory for digits, nonword repetition, and blending nonwords. The results of the study using multi-variate analysis of variance (MANOVA) showed a significant main effect of the grade level, Wilks' lambda [F(3,763) = 13.44, p < .001, η 2 = .29, gender, F(1,763) = 1.96, p < .001, η 2 = .06], while the interaction (grade level X gender) was not significant.
Development of phonological sensitivity in 2- to 5-year-old children
Journal of Educational Psychology, 1998
This study examined phonological sensitivity in 238 children from middle-to upper-income families and 118 children from lower-income families across different levels of linguistic complexity. Children ranged in age from 2 to 5 years. Overall, the results indicated that as children increased in age, phonological sensitivity both increased in absolute terms and became more stable. Significant social class differences in growth of phonological sensitivity were also obtained. Phonological sensitivity at different levels of linguistic complexity (e.g., syllables, phonemes) was substantially interrelated at each age and predicted word reading ability in older children independently of language skills and letter knowledge. These results indicate that phonological sensitivity can be assessed in young preschool children and that lower levels of phonological sensitivity may serve as developmental precursors to higher levels of phonological sensitivity. provided helpful comments on earlier versions of this article. We also wish to acknowledge the contribution of the child care centers, directors, and personnel who assisted with this project as well as the children and parents who made it possible. We also express our thanks to
Scientific Studies of Reading
The effects of a kindergarten training program in phonological awareness with 209 Swedish-speaking children were followed up until the end of Grade 9. Initial levels of letter knowledge and phonological awareness were positively associated with the level of decoding skill in Grade 3 but not with its growth afterward. The intervention group performed significantly better in decoding in Grade 3, and the difference was maintained until Grade 6. The trained children also scored higher in Grade 9 reading comprehension. Although the results give empirical support for a connection between early phonological awareness training, later word decoding development, and still later reading comprehension, the theoretical explanation for the link between especially word decoding and reading comprehension is far from clear.