Early Literacy Screening in Kindergarten: Widespread Implementation in Virginia

Journal of Literacy Research, Winter 2004/2005 by Invernizzi, Marcia, Justice, Laura, Landrum, Timothy J, Booker, Keonya

Implementation of PALS-K: Participants

In Fall 2003, which marked the seventh year of widespread implementation of PALS-K in Virginia, kindergarten teachers in 131 (99%) of the school districts across the Commonwealth voluntarily participated in this initiative. All kindergarten teachers in the participating districts used PALS-K to screen the early literacy skills of a total of 83,099 kindergarten students. As has been the case since 1998, the second year of the initiative, teachers entered data via the PALS-K website, a secure, password-protected, encrypted Internet database. Validity checks of this database have consistently indicated that teachers enter data into the database with a high degree of accuracy (99% or greater). Teachers, principals, and district representatives have immediate access to a variety of interpretive reports downloadable from the Internet (c.f., Partridge, Invernizzi, Meier, & Sullivan, 2003).

Participant characteristics for the seventh fall kindergarten cohort are presented in Table 2. Males comprised slightly more than half the sample (52%, n = 43,534). The children ranged in age from 3 years, 10 months, to 10 years, 9 months, with a mean age of 5 years, 7 months (SD = 4.5 months). The cohort represented a diverse group of students that essentially mirrored the race and ethnicity of the kindergarten enrollment in Virginia: 58% (n = 48,300) were Caucasian, 26% (n = 21,985) were African-American, 8% (n = 6,573) were Hispanic, 4% (n = 3,367) were Asian and Pacific Islanders, and fewer than 1% (n = 602) were Native American. A number of the participating children (15%, n = 12,374) were receiving additional school services based on identified special needs. These included special education services for speech/language impairment (6%), developmental delay (2%), learning disability (0.4%), and emotional disturbance (0.1%), as well as services based on English as a second language (3%) or Title I status (4%).

School divisions participating in the EIRI and screening their kindergartners with PALS-K represented the full range of poverty levels as estimated by free and reduced lunch counts at the school level. For example, 29.9% of the 82,576 students for whom SES data were available attended schools with free or reduced-price lunch counts exceeding 50% of their enrolled students, and 6.8% of the students attended schools with free lunch counts over 75%.

Results of Implementation

Descriptive Analysis

Both raw scores from individual subtests and summed (composite) scores from Fall 2003 are presented in Table 3. In the statewide sample, kindergarten students performed the rhyme awareness subtask with 78% accuracy on average and the beginning sound awareness subtask with 71% accuracy. They were able to identify nearly 18 of 26 (69%) of lower-case letters and identified the sounds that corresponded to upper-case letters with 40% accuracy (about 10 letter sounds out of 26). Out of 20 possible points on the spelling task (1 point for each of the 15 phonemes represented in the five spelling words, plus an additional point for each complete word spelled accurately), children averaged 6.2 points, indicating that they correctly represented about 40% of the phonemes in these words with phonetically acceptable letters. On the concept of word task, kindergartners demonstrated accurate recall of an average of 2 out of 10 possible words.