Comparing Individual Differences In Literacy Development In Pre-Kindergarteners And Kindergarteners: A Literature Review And A Proposal For Future Research

Abstract

The thesis, Comparing Individual Differences in Literacy Development in Pre-Kindergarteners and Kindergarteners, is a literature review that examines some of the research literature, focusing on the different aspect’s researchers examined related to literacy development. The articles focused heavily on children’s self-concept and the home literacy environment that the parents provide for the child. This thesis describes in depth five articles with a connection to either the home literacy environment, or children’s self-concept. The self-concept articles specifically examined how children viewed their own competency in completing school-related tasks. The articles reviewed were chosen because of their connection to the literacy environment and children’s success. From the analysis of these articles a study is proposed in which the home literacy environment would be evaluated, and children would be asked questions related to their self-competence. These two measures would then be related to children’s reading test scores to examine the relative contribution of each of the two predictors to literacy. In addition to the detailed discussion of previous work, this thesis describes in depth the measures that would be used in this study, the HOME, the Harter Self-Competence scale and school measures such as the BAS and PALs.