The influence of pre-school experience on early literacy attainment: the research evidence

Greg Brooks, University of Sheffield

National Literacy Trust: Occasional Papers. Paper presented at the 2nd Annual Conference "Early-Years- Building the Foundations for Literacy", London, 6 November 2000. 

Copyright: Single copies may be made for private and institutional use. Mass reproductions of this paper must receive the prior written consent of the National Literacy Trust. For more information, contact: National Literacy Trust, 68 South Lambeth Road, London SW8 1RL. Tel: 0207 587 1842. 

Summary 
Aim 
Attending pre-school 
General intervention studies 
Focused intervention studies 
Parents reading to children 
Other factors 
Summing Up 
References 

There is very little research evidence on the benefit to children's early literacy learning of intervention programmes before the age of 3, it was said last week.  Speaking at the National Literacy Trust's second annual conference in London, Dr Greg Brooks of the National Foundation for Educational Research summarised the research evidence relating children's pre-school experience to their attainment in reading and writing between the ages of 5 and 8.  He said that there is evidence that attending some form of pre-school (nursery, playgroup, etc.) is associated with higher early literacy attainment at age 5 and 6 than being cared for exclusively at home, even when social class and other factors are allowed for - for this he cited the Effective Provision of Pre-school Education (EPPE) project that is being led by Professor Kathy Sylva of Oxford University and colleagues, and a large study of literacy attainment in year 2 in Malta. 

A number of studies in Britain, the USA and Portugal have established that wide-ranging, high-quality programmes for children aged between 3 and 5 benefit their early literacy, the best-known example being High/Scope.  But Dr Brooks could find only three programmes which had worked with under-3s: 

• Carolina Abecedarian - this started in 1972 and has always begun working with families just weeks after the target child's birth.  Compared to a control group, children who participated had higher reading scores and ages 8, 12 and 15
• Parents as Teachers (USA) begins even earlier in life, during the third trimester of pregnancy.  At age 6, programme children scored significantly better than a comparison group on standardised tests of reading ability
• Bookstart began in Birmingham in 1992, and the first cohort of about 300 children entered school in 1997 and had their Baseline assessments that year and their key stage 1 assessments in 1999.  At Baseline, the Bookstart children had a higher average score in reading, and at KS1 in all four literacy tests.

It is also well known that programmes which boost children's phonological skills (rhyme, alliteration and so on) benefit their literacy, but little of the evidence seems to be based on children under 3.  Similarly, a very large meta-analysis (statistical combining of separate studies) in 1995 showed that parents reading to children is beneficial - a pleasing even if obvious finding, but it is not clear how much of the evidence for it relates to under-3s. 

However, the EPPE study - which includes nearly 3,000 children - has some clear findings.  After controlling for the impact of parents' occupations and education, several aspects of the home learning environment were found to have a significant impact on children's attainment at school entry, including the frequency with which children play with letters or numbers at home, parents drawing children's attention to sounds and letters, the frequency with which parents report reading to their child and the frequency of library visits - in other words, a home environment conducive to literacy learning. 

The major gaps in the research evidence identified by Dr Brooks were that there is far less evidence of impact on writing than on reading, much less evidence on interventions before age 3 than on those that operate between 3 and 5, little evidence on lasting benefit, and much less evidence on many of the specifics of programmes than on broad effects. 

Aim 
Initiatives such as Sure Start which focus on the pre-school years assume that enhancement of children's pre-school experiences will pay off in raised attainment at school entry and later, and we all want to believe this - but how strong is the evidence?  In order to re-affirm our belief that enhancement of pre-school experience is important, we need to go beyond conventional wisdom and look at the research, and that is the aim of this paper. 

The paper deals with research which relates children's experiences before the age of 5 to their attainment in literacy between the ages of 5 and 8.  Within that, given the focus of the National Literacy Trust conference, particular attention is drawn to research which relates children's experiences before the age of 3 to their attainment in literacy between the ages of 5 and 8. It is worth saying immediately that there is very little research which relates children's experiences before the age of 3 to their later attainment in literacy, despite the huge amount of research that has been done on very young children, especially on their language development.  

Attending pre-school 
It is logical to start with the most general question of all:  do children who attend playgroup or nursery, rather than being cared for at home or by a childminder, have higher early literacy attainment?  One obvious way to investigate this is to study groups of children who undergo these different experiences and correlate those differences with literacy attainment. Routinely, the result is predictable:  children who attend playgroup or nursery have better attainment than those who don't.  But (as pointed out most clearly by Sylva, 1994) there is a methodological flaw in almost all the relevant studies:  the groups of children who have different forms of pre-school experience were different to start with.  In particular, children who are cared for at home or by a childminder tend to be of lower SES than those who attend playgroup or nursery - and very few of the relevant studies have controlled for this or other pre-existing differences.  

However, there are two large-scale studies that have controlled for pre-existing differences. Although neither studied children before the age of 3, both have gathered information retrospectively on children's experiences before that age.  Kathy Sylva and colleagues are running a powerful study in England called EPPE, Effective Provision of Pre-School Education.  In June 2000 they gave evidence about it to the House of Commons Education Sub-Committee (see House of Commons, 2000), and showed that they had controlled for a whole range of possible confounding factors while analysing data on children's attainment at school entry, including pre- and early literacy.  Children who had attended no form of pre-school provision at all (who numbered about 250) had lower average scores on every measure of attainment than children who had been in some form of provision (who numbered over 2,500).  However, the EPPE team were not yet ready to report differences in school-entry attainment according to different forms of pre-school provision, and their results for the end of KS1 are not due until 2001. 

Meanwhile there is some evidence from a large study conducted in Malta in 1999 (Mifsud et al., 2000).  A national survey was mounted of the literacy attainment in both Maltese and English of virtually all the 5,500 Year 2 children in Malta.  Besides literacy data background data were collected on the children (gender, age, SEN, first language and, most important here, years of pre-school education) and on their families (father's occupation and father's and mother's educational level).  So there were both proxy measures of SES and data on other factors which needed to be controlled for when estimating the influence of number of years of pre-school education (which in Malta means largely nursery schools).  Even controlling for those factors it was found that children who had had less than two years' pre-school education had significantly lower average scores than the rest. 

Therefore attending some form of pre-school provision rather than none or very little appears to be correlated with higher literacy attainment at ages 5 and 6.  But as is well known, correlation does not prove causation, and for evidence on that it is necessary to look at intervention or training studies. 

General intervention studies 
Intervention or training studies are projects where an initiative is implemented with a relevant group(s) of children, preferably with a control or comparison group, and direct measures are later taken of children's attainment.  A search of the literature turned up nine intervention studies containing both a wide-ranging pre-school initiative and direct literacy measures.  (By 'wide-ranging' is meant projects that address many aspects of pre-school children's experience, not just one. Two very focused intervention studies will be mentioned later.) 

Of the nine projects, four are from Britain, four from the United States, and one from Portugal.  Two of the British projects, the PEEP project in Oxford about which Rosie Roberts will be speaking shortly, and the REAL project in Sheffield directed by Peter Hannon, do not yet have evaluation results to report but will provide rich data when they do. 

The earlier of the other British projects was a pioneering initiative in nurseries run and evaluated by NFER in 1968-73 and reported by M. Woodhead (1976).  His team worked with about 100 children in five nurseries, using the Peabody Language Development Kit to enhance their spoken language development.  However, when the children were tested at age 6, neither of the two reading measures showed a statistically significant difference over the comparison group. 

The other British study is the NFER evaluation of the Basic Skills Agency's Family Literacy Demonstration Programmes (Brooks et al., 1996, 1997).  Writing samples were taken from 362 children in the evaluation, of whom about half were aged 3 or 4 at the start.  When various sub-sets of the children were re-tested at various points up to 2½ years later, the 3- and 4-year-olds, along with the rest, showed substantial average gains, which the evaluation team judged to be greater than would have been expected from 'normal' progress. 

All four of the US studies have been running for quite a few years. The grandparent of them all is the Ypsilanti Perry Preschool Project in Michigan, better known as High/Scope, which began in 1962.  It operated in pre-school, from age 3, and stopped when children entered kindergarten.  One of the early reports (Weikart et al., 1978, pp.53, 57) showed that project children had significantly higher reading scores than controls in third and fourth grades (ages 9 and 10).  Later stages of the project did not report reading scores, but did show that the project participants continued to have better academic achievement up to the end of high school, and better success in life up to at least age 27 (see Sylva, 2000, pp.124-8).  However, all these findings are based on only about 50 subjects in each group. 

The Chicago Child-Parent Center (see Karoly et al., 1998, p.45-7) was started in 1967, and its main evaluation began in 1983.  The numbers here are much more substantial:  1,150 participants and 389 non-participants.  Participating children entered the programme at age 3 or 4 or in kindergarten (age 5), and some stayed in it up to age 9.  At age 9, participants had a significantly higher average reading score. 

The Carolina Abecedarian project (Campbell and Ramey, 1995; see Karoly et al., 1998, p.51-3) started in 1972 and has always begun working with families just weeks after the target child's birth.  For the evaluation, just over 100 families were identified, and then, by the time the child was 6 weeks old, assigned randomly to participation or to a control group.  The programme ran for all participants until age 5, and for some until age 8.  At age 8, participants had a significantly higher average reading score, and this was also true at ages 12 and 15.  Also, the mothers were interviewed when the children were 4½, and by this point participating mothers had more years of education, on average, than non-participants, despite this not having been true when their children were born - so the participating mothers had gone in for further study.  This finding resonates with a US analysis (Benjamin, 1993) of several family literacy studies which showed that mothers are more likely to improve their children's literacy when they have the opportunity to improve  their own, and that so-called family literacy programmes which do not have sessions for the children are not successful. 

The last of the four US projects is called Parents as Teachers (National Diffusion Network, 1996; see National Research Council, 1998, p.144).  It begins even earlier in life, during the third trimester of pregnancy, and runs until the children are 3.  In first grade (age 6), programme children scored significantly better than a comparison group on standardised tests of reading ability. 

The last of the intervention studies was carried out in Lisbon by a researcher named Nabuco (see Sylva, 2000, pp.127-31).  Nabuco investigated the effect of three pre-school approaches on children's attainment.  The three approaches were High/Scope, a Formal Skills curriculum, and a Progressive Nursery programme, each implemented in five centres;  the total number of children in these groups was 219.  Control groups of children who had had no such experience were recruited when they and the participants entered primary school at age 6.  The High/Scope children significantly outperformed all other groups in both reading and writing at the end of grade 1. 

The general intervention studies can be summed up by saying that they provide just enough evidence to show that wide-ranging, high-quality pre-school interventions do benefit children's early literacy attainment.  The sole reported null finding, from the NFER Pre-School Project, may have been because it targeted only oral skills, and did not focus at all on pre-literacy skills.  Also, that project and the (ineffective) non-High/Scope conditions in the Lisbon project did not involve parents. The two projects mentioned above which included children under 3 (Carolina Abecedarian, Parents as Teachers) suggest that interventions which begin very early can be effective - but the numbers on which this inference is based are very small.  And the two projects with long-term follow-ups (High/Scope, Carolina Abecedarian) suggest that benefits can be long-lasting - but here too the numbers are very small. 

Focused intervention studies 
Neither the large-scale studies mentioned at the beginning nor the general intervention studies address the question of what particular practices or activities might have benefited children's literacy.  The following analysis of evidence on specifics begins with focused intervention studies.  Pre-eminent here is the well-known line of research on phonological awareness, particularly associated with Peter Bryant, Usha Goswami and various colleagues.  Because this work is well known and well documented, it is not necessary to go into it in detail.  Briefly, over the years it has been shown that training various levels of children's phonological awareness (onset and rime, phonemic) before school benefits their literacy attainment once in school. 

The only other line of research that might be classed as a focused intervention study is the long-term study on Bookstart.  Bookstart began in Birmingham in 1992, and the first cohort of about 300 children entered school in 1997 and had their Baseline assessments that year and their key stage 1 assessments in 1999.  Both at Baseline and at KS1, Wade and Moore (1998, 2000) were able to assess 41 Bookstart children and 41 comparison children chosen from the same classes and carefully matched to the Bookstart children.  At Baseline, the Bookstart children had a higher average score in reading, and at KS1 in all four literacy tests (two in reading, plus writing and spelling).  This evidence as encouraging, but hardly definitive given the small sample sizes.  More convincing evidence may eventually emerge from the national evaluation of Bookstart currently being conducted from the University of Surrey at Roehampton if the relevant children can be tracked at least up to school entry. 

Parents reading to children 
What evidence is there on other specific practices?  The most widespread has to be parents reading books to children, and here there is very strong evidence that it benefits children's early attainment in reading.  Now even though this is both pleasing and, one might feel, obvious, it is worth explaining just how strong the evidence for it is in general, even though it is then necessary to point out a limitation.  Bus et al. (1995) published a large meta-analysis on this topic, based on nine studies containing 2,248 children.  The combined probability level was so high that they calculated (p.7) that 'it would take at least another 1,834 studies with null results to bring the combined probability level' back to statistical non-significance.  It seems reasonable to say that here coincidence has been excluded.  And contained within their analysis was another piece of good news - the effectiveness of parents reading books to their children did not vary according to SES.  However, even though some of the studies they analysed must have had data on children up to 3 it is not clear how strong the evidence is for that age range. 

A similar finding in a slightly earlier study has been the object of some scholarly debate (Scarborough and Dobrich, 1994;  see commentaries by Dunning et al., 1994 and Lonigan, 1994).  Some commentators maintain that other factors, such as SES or children's attitudes to reading, have larger effects on reading attainment than parents reading to children;  and in both studies the amount of variance in reading attainment predicted by parents reading to their children was only 7-8 per cent.  Other commentators say that the effect of other factors is reduced if they are analysed simultaneously with parents reading to their children, and that even that small amount of variance can make a large difference to children's further educational progress. 

What seems to be generally agreed is that the quality of the shared reading may be crucial - and although a lot of research to tease that out remains to be done there are some useful findings around.  For example, Jeanne Detemple (1995) in the USA visited 54 families when the child was 3½, 4½ and 5½ years old and studied both the quality of the mother's talk while reading to the children and the children's literacy attainment in kindergarten (age 5).  She found that 'non-immediate talk' by the mothers, for example explanations, inferences, predictions, etc., was much rarer than 'immediate talk' such as labelling, counting and paraphrasing;  but that the mothers' use of non-immediate talk when the children were 3½ was associated with higher literacy scores in kindergarten, and that the percentage of immediate talk at all three ages was negatively associated with literacy scores. 

Several researchers' insights on how parents' reading to children contributes to the children's greater progress in literacy learning were summed up recently by Purcell-Gates (in Purcell-Gates and Waterman, 2000, p.215) as follows: 'Children who experience years of listening to written stories implicitly learn the linguistic differences between oral discourse and written storybook discourse, particularly the literate vocabulary, complex grammatical constructions and the decontextualised nature of written language.  Children with the Big Picture of literacy functions (knowledge that print "means" linguistically and that it serves many purposes in people's lives) take more intentionally and successfully from instruction.' 

Other factors 
That quotation is already leading into a consideration of factors besides parents reading to children.  In this area indefinitely many pieces of correlational research could be cited, on various aspects, but it will be more appropriate to select just a few, since not all that many have research evidence before age 3.  Weinberger (1996) studied 42 children from age 3 to age 7, in order to extend knowledge of pre-school experiences that relate to success or lack of it in literacy learning in school.  Significant factors about good readers at 7 were that at age 3 they were more likely to have had a favourite book, to have been read to a lot before 3, to have been library members, and to have been reported as knowing several nursery rhymes - which again they must have learn before they were 3. 

The EPPE study mentioned earlier also has some clear findings:  'After controlling for the impact of parents' occupations and education, aspects of the home learning environment were found to have a significant impact on children's cognitive [including literacy] development . at school entry: 

• the frequency with which the child plays with letters/numbers at home .
• parents' drawing children's attention to sounds and letters .
• the frequency with which parents reported reading to their child . [and] the frequency of library visits.' (House of Commons, 2000, p.183)

To sum up, there is good evidence for the impact of some pre-school experiences on literacy attainment, particularly attendance at high-quality pre-school provision, developing phonological awareness, parents reading to children, and a home environment conducive to literacy learning - all of which indicates the crucial roles both of parents and of careful planning of pre-school provision.  But there is also a great deal that has yet to be established.  There is far less evidence of impact on writing than on reading;  there is much less evidence on interventions before age 3 than on those that operate between 3 and 5;  there is little evidence on lasting benefit;  and there is much less evidence on many of the specifics of programmes than on broad effects. 

In particular, we do not yet have research evidence for ages 0-3 on, for instance: 
 

• whether different forms of experience in those very early years (for example, childcare vs home vs nursery) have different effects - though the EPPE project will soon provide some
• whether enhancing the language parents use to small children might benefit the children's literacy attainment
• whether specific attention in the very early years to the phonological aspect of language (including rhyme, songs, wordplay) might benefit literacy attainment
• whether enhancing social and physical factors (relationships, self-esteem, motor skills, etc.) might benefit literacy attainment, etc.

Also, a team in Oklahoma (Dunn et al., 2000) recently reviewed four studies in an attempt to optimise the literacy environment for pre-schoolers.  One of those studies examined environments in centre-based childcare programmes in 30 childcare classrooms serving 3- and 4-year-olds;  one of the findings was that 'In nine of the classrooms not a single literacy-related activity was evident during free play' - which begs the question 'Why assume that there should be literacy-related activity during free play?'  However, from this and the other three studies the authors concluded (and who could disagree?) that much work has yet to be done by both the research and practitioner communities before high-quality literacy environments become the norm in early childhood programmes. 

All of this chimes in with what another US researcher wrote recently:  'As we enter the 21st century it is clear that we are changing our view of early child care from one of a safe haven to one of developmental enhancement' (Gallagher, 2000).  If this may be re-expressed in a railway metaphor, we think we know where the track leads, but we need to proceed with care. 

References 

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