How do children progress from making scribble lines to drawing people and writing their names in the first 5 or 6 years of life? And what does this amazing mark-making process tell us about their developing minds, bodies, and language skills? We did a study called Drawing into Early Writing (DEW), in which we collected drawing and early writing samples made by five preschool children. Our goals were to describe each sample, score each sample using four measures, and compare children’s scores over time to understand each child’s growth. This study gave us clues on how young children develop from drawing into writing. We are currently doing a larger study with 100 participants, ages 1–5.

Examining young children's progressions in drawing, from scribble lines to graphic representations of people, places, and objects-to their writing of alphabetic symbols-may open windows into knowledge of early cognitive, language, and motor development. In the present mixed-method investigation, we first review prior literature on such transitions, which includes discussion of the stages or sequences of mark-making, drawing, and early writing. We then discuss existing measures of human figure drawings, name writing, early writing, oral language (mean length of utterance of the child's descriptions of each drawing/writing sample), and content themes. Next, for five children aged 3-5 years attending a university-affiliated preschool, we examine repeated sets of drawings and early writings, ranging from 23 to 73 samples per child, from archival materials. Each case study includes both (a) narrative descriptions of each child's progressions and (b) analyses of scores on the included measures. With the overall aim of preparing for a larger study that includes regular and more dataintensive samples subject to blinded scoring, we provide comparisons within each child and across children-featuring linear trends and high intra-individual variability- regarding development of graphic symbol systems (i.e., drawing and early writing) during the foundational preschool years.

This study examines the influence of a parent workshop intervention on vocabulary acquisition of at-risk preschool children during parent-child shared storybook reading. Sixty-nine parents were randomly assigned to either treatment or control group. In the treatment condition, parents were taught to implement elaborated vocabulary instruction (definitions, synonyms, and examples) and non-elaborated vocabulary instruction (simple definitions only) during shared storybook reading (SSR). In the control group (stories only), parents read the same storybooks as the treatment families but did not provide direct vocabulary instruction. Children's vocabulary learning was assessed using a researcher-designed assessment, Big Words for Little People (BWLP), at three time points during the study: before, after, and 14 days following the end of the intervention. The results suggest that meaningful explanations of unfamiliar words during parent-child shared storybook reading may be a viable strategy for fostering vocabulary learning, which is critical for later reading achievement.

Findings from education to neuroscience highlight the role of young children’s print-related skills, including early writing, in predicting and enhancing the development of their later literacy abilities. However, the field lacks standardized, comprehensive measures with relatively brief scoring systems that can capture the progression from scribble lines into shapes, letters, first words, and messages. Repeated writing samples from Tools of the Mind curriculum provided a unique opportunity to examine growth across 6 months of preschool. To score the continuum of early writing skills, we designed a pilot 9-point scale (Early Writing-9; EW-9). Inter-coder agreement was high (ICC = 0.96, p < 0.001). In a sample of 62 children (3–5-years of age), we scored an average of 16 weekly samples per child, from the beginning of the school year until early spring. Findings from multilevel growth-curve models demonstrated that the development of early writing skills was substantial, highly variable, and often rapid. The shape of the trajectory yielded significant linear, quadratic, cubic, and quartic trends, consistent with a pattern of overall tapering growth. Among all predictor variables entered, including gender, age, and number of years in the program, only name-writing ability (assessed at school entry) predicted early writing scores after 6 months. Theoretical and educational implications for early writing development during preschool are discussed.

ABSTRACTMany words in English resemble one another in multiple ways. Words with similar spellings are referred to as orthographic neighbors. The purpose of this within‐subject experimental study was to examine the effect of orthographic neighbors on the spelling acquisition of second‐grade students. In each of five sessions of a computer‐based experiment, 71 participants were presented with two prime words and prompted to learn the spelling of seven novel words. The latter seven words were control words (no meaningful connection with the corresponding prime word) and neighbor words (words representing various types of connections with the corresponding prime word). Spelling tasks were administered twice: immediately after the experiment and two days later. The findings suggest that spelling acquisition depends on two critical factors: orthographic neighbor type and orthographic processing ability. Students’ spelling acquisition was supported by analogizing rime neighbors (e.g., rain/vain). However, facilitative effects were not found for substitution neighbors (e.g., rain/ruin) and transposition neighbors (e.g., clam/calm). Additionally, a student’s level of orthographic processing was an important determinant of spelling acquisition; students with well‐developed orthographic processing ability correctly learned the novel words regardless of the presence of rime neighbors. In contrast, acquiring spelling was far more difficult for students with less developed orthographic processing ability, but their spelling acquisition was strongly facilitated by the presence of rime neighbors. Implications of this research are (a) learners’ orthographic processing skills should be considered when designing spelling instruction and (b) early elementary students need instructional support when making orthographic analogies for substitution and transposition neighbors.

The goal of this study was to test the item-based assumption of the self-teaching hypothesis by reanalyzing Cunningham's (2006) data. In Cunningham's study, 37 first graders participated in a self-teaching experiment, and their orthographic learning was measured by a spelling task and an orthographic choice task. A 2-level logistic regression model was used to analyze accuracy of phonological decoding of a target word and spelling acquisition of that word. The findings suggest that the probability of spelling a target word correctly increases as the decoding accuracy of the target word increases. In contrast, this relation was not found for the orthographic choice task. The discrepancy in the results between the 2 dependent measures might be due to the difference in cognitive processes required to complete a production task as opposed to a recognition task. The current findings provide item-based evidence for the accuracy of phonological decoding on participants' performance on a spelling task.

It is well known that the home environment is a major factor in a child’s literacy development. Exactly how different home-environmental factors play out across different national contexts is not as well understood. Using data from the 2011 Progress in International Reading and Literacy Study (PIRLS), we tested for structural invariance in the relationship between early childhood home literacy practices and later fourth-grade achievement among students across 52 countries or regions within countries (N = 106,297–109,582), while controlling for background characteristics. Findings indicate that the effect of many aspects of the home environment prior to school age, including adult-child interactions and parental values and beliefs about reading, may interact with national factors, particularly factors relating to government-subsidised preschool programmes. Implications include that any early home reading intervention efforts should include thoughtful consideration of the national policies and funding for preschool learning.

This study features a design experiment of a teacher study group model of professional development. Our goal was to support teachers' development of the knowledge and practices that promote children's emergent literacy in the preschool classroom. Three sequential cohorts involving a total of 19 teachers in a district serving a high-need, under-resourced community participated in a year-long intervention; child outcomes were examined for 101 randomly selected preschool children. Consistent with previous research, teachers demonstrated low initial levels of knowledge of phonological awareness, and phonological awareness activities in classrooms were of low quantity and quality. Pre- and post-test analyses revealed significant changes in teachers' phonological awareness ability, content knowledge, and pedagogical knowledge. Increases were also seen in the quantity and quality of phonological awareness activities in the classroom. Finally, the children in our sample demonstrated significant gains on a measure of their phonological awareness skills and made more progress in this area over the course of the study than would be expected based on national norms of same-aged children. This work offers initial support for the use of relationship-based models of professional development as a means to address many of the challenges inherent in the current early childhood education landscape. Teacher study groups offer a promising means of developing a qualified, competent, confident workforce that is well equipped to meet the needs of the children they serve. (C) 2015 Published by Elsevier Inc.

As teacher quality becomes a central issue in discussions of children's literacy, both researchers and policy makers alike express increasing concern with how teachers structure and allocate their lesson time for literacy-related activities as well as with what they know about reading development, processes, and pedagogy. The authors examined the beliefs, literacy knowledge, and proposed instructional practices of 121 first-grade teachers. Through teacher self-reports concerning the amount of instructional time they would prefer to devote to a variety of language arts activities, the authors investigated the structure of teachers' implicit beliefs about reading instruction and explored relationships between those beliefs, expertise with general or special education students, years of experience, disciplinary knowledge, and self-reported distribution of an array of instructional practices. They found that teachers' implicit beliefs were not significantly associated with their status as a regular or special education teacher, the number of years they had been teaching, or their disciplinary knowledge. However, it was observed that subgroups of teachers who highly valued particular approaches to reading instruction allocated their time to instructional activities associated with other approaches in vastly different ways. It is notable that the practices of teachers who privileged reading literature over other activities were not in keeping with current research and policy recommendations. Implications and considerations for further research are discussed.

Reading acquisition is arguably the most complex, developmentally interesting cognitive task that children are expected to undertake while in school. Although there is growing recognition that certified and highly trained teachers positively influence student learning and development (Darling-Hammond, 2000), the effective teaching of literacy skills requires not only knowledge cultivated through basic preand in-service programs, but also that educators acquire and apply a sophisticated understanding of the nuances of the English language. Additionally, the increasing diversity of students’ cognitive, linguistic, and academic abilities in today’s classrooms has put even greater pressure on teachers to develop varied strategies that will foster student literacy growth. Similarly, as we aim to support the literacy development of all children both before and throughout their formal education, it is important to recognize that teachers at different grade levels must acquire different types of knowledge and utilize different strategies in order to best support their students. As our education system attempts to identify the most effective strategies to minimize the discrepancies between underserved and more advantaged populations, it is critical that both educators and researchers recognize the powerful impact that teacher knowledge of early literacy skills can have on students’ long-term academic success and continue empirical explorations of exactly how, when, and why teachers have this influence. In the past three decades, the field of teacher knowledge in the domain of literacy has grown considerably. Researchers have continued to more specifically characterize the knowledge that teachers and teacher educators must acquire and apply (Almasi, 2002; Ball, 2000; Joshi et al., 2009; Shulman, 1986, 1987), craft professional development programs that help teachers cultivate such knowledge (McCutchen