COLUMBUS, Ohio – Researchers at Ohio State say a new study indicates that a child’s ability to read in third grade may be significantly affected by how ready they are to learn four years earlier.
The study of students in Columbus City Schools found that test given to all Ohio children in kindergarten can predict if they will be proficient readers by third grade.
“In some ways, it is astonishing that we can predict so well in kindergarten how well kids will be able to read in third grade. The more important policy implication is what we do about this knowledge – what can we do to help those children who we know in kindergarten will have trouble reading in third grade if we don’t intervene?” says Laura Justice, executive director of OSU’s Crane Center for Early Childhood Research and Policy and co-author of the study.
The research, published by the center, indicates that two-thirds of children who showed potential reading problems in kindergarten later failed the reading portion of the third-grade Ohio Achievement Assessment.
According to the study, which used data on 11,515 students who entered kindergarten between 2005 and 2009, those students who scored highest on the Kindergarten Readiness Assessment for Literacy were eight times more likely to pass the third-grade assessment exam than those students who scored the lowest.
Justice says the purpose of the study was to test whether a child who is ready to read in kindergarten is more likely to meet third-grade reading expectations than a student who is not ready and provide educators with some guidance about how to help kindergarten students who need it the most.
Justice is executive director of the Crane Center for Early Childhood Research and Policy at OSU’s College of Education and Human Ecology and professor of teaching and learning. She conducted the study with Jessica Logan and Jill Pentimonti, both research scientists at the center.