This study examined the relationship between attention problems and expressive language and academic readiness skills in preschool-aged children from middle-class families. Forty-three children (44% female) were assessed individually for expressive language skills and knowledge of basic academic concepts (e.g. colours, letters and numbers). The…

This study is the first randomized study of the impacts of the vocabulary instruction program Kindergarten PAVEd for Success (K-PAVE) (Hamilton and Schwanenflugel 2011) on low-income students in kindergarten and grade 1. The study has two components. The first component is a test of the impacts of one year of the K-PAVE vocabulary instruction in…

State education departments, in discussions with Regional Educational Laboratory (REL) Southeast, identified low reading achievement as a critical issue for their students and expressed an interest in identifying effective strategies to promote the foundational skills in young students that might improve reading achievement. The Mississippi…

This study compared the syntactic skills of Spanish-speaking children with low and average school achievement from kindergarten to fifth grade using oral narratives that were elicited with book and film retelling tasks. Results indicated that low achieving children exhibited limited use of complex syntax and greater formulation difficulties in…