Research to Practice Summary: Assessing Young Children's Emergent Literacy Skills

Abstract

Three measures of emergent literacy were administered to preschool students attending Head Start. It was hypothesized that all three were not necessary to administer, given that they included tasks purporting to measure similar constructs. To test this hypothesis, a multitrait-multimethod matrix was constructed and canonical correlation analyses were conducted. Results suggested that although correlations between individual tasks were low to moderate, there was redundancy among the overall measures. The implication is that all three were not necessary to administer, although it remains unknown which combination of administration methods provides the most valid data. Practice and future research suggestions are provided.