Effects of Earlier Special Education Placement on Pre-Literacy and Literacy Skills Development

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Abstract/Contents

Abstract: The study estimates the impact of earlier special education placement on a number of preliteracy skills and independent reading level over the course of the academic year. Specifically, it examines differences between students placed in special education during transitional kindergarten (TK) (N=233) or kindergarten (N=1,769) against students placed in special education after TK (N=76) or kindergarten (N=1,116). Weights from entropy balancing with age, race/ethnicity, English language proficiency, gender, percent-free or reduced lunch (school-level), and kindergarten cohort year are used to create a best possible comparison group, and the outcomes of interest are from San Francisco Unified School District’s Fountas and Pinnell 2015-2016 to 2021-2022 test score data. The findings are that there is no significant effect of earlier placement on the preliteracy composite score, but earlier-placed students perform a bit better on letter recognition and letter sounds but worse on initial syllables, blending, rhyming, and early literacy behaviors (though, the degree of significance differs by skill, sample, and testing window). Additionally, there is a significant positive effect size of earlier placement on independent reading level – this difference becomes significant in kindergarten spring and grows over the course of the first-grade year.

Type of resource	text
Publication date	June 9, 2023; June 9, 2023

Author	Farris, Alysson
Thesis advisor	Lemons, Chris
Degree granting institution	Stanford University
Department	Graduate School of Education

Subject	Special education
Subject	Literacy
Subject	Literacy > Study and teaching (Early childhood)
Subject	Early childhood education
Genre	Text
Genre	Thesis

DOI	https://doi.org/10.25740/cj326jb8300
Location	https://purl.stanford.edu/cj326jb8300

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License: This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 4.0 International license (CC BY-NC).

Preferred citation: Farris, A. (2023). Effects of Earlier Special Education Placement on Pre-Literacy and Literacy Skills Development. Stanford Digital Repository. Available at https://purl.stanford.edu/cj326jb8300. https://doi.org/10.25740/cj326jb8300.

Undergraduate Honors Theses, Graduate School of Education

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