Final Report: Implementation and Pilot Study
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Procedures
All child level assessments were administered in the May of 2023. Students were assessed by trained research assistants on several measures of school readiness (e.g., math, literacy, executive function). If students spoke a language other than English at home (n = 18), they were screened using the Simon Says and Art Show subtests of the preLAS 2000 (Duncan & DeAvila, 1998). Scores on these two subtests were added to create a total score. If students met the cutoff (i.e., 15 out of 20), determined by a prior study (i.e., Rainelli et al., 2017), they received all assessments of school readiness in English. It is important to note, that though 14 out of 18 DLLs assessed on the preLAS 2000 scored higher than the 15-point English cutoff, they are still deemed DLLs as they were learning both English and Spanish. If students did not meet this cutoff (n = 4), they received all assessments in English and Spanish, except for the executive function and receptive vocabulary measures. The measure of executive function was only administered to these four students in Spanish. These four students were not assessed on the measure of receptive vocabulary. However, due to the small number of DLL students who fell below the cutoff, we opted to use English assessments in all analyses. Findings Below we describe the findings from our analyses of student assessments. We begin with a discussion of our descriptive analyses, which compares the students in the PKOMW classrooms and those in the comparison group. Next, we examined differences between the two groups on measures of school readiness. To do so, we first conducted t-tests to compare differences between the two groups on measures of school readiness without controlling for any variables. Then, we looked at the differences between the two groups, controlling for demographic and other variables (listed below). Lastly, we restricted the sample to only include dual language learners, and compared differences between the two groups of students, and controlled for demographics and contextual level variables. We end this section with a discussion of the measures where we observed the largest differences between the two student groups.
Descriptive Analyses
To understand whether students in the PKOMW classrooms and those in the comparison classrooms had similar backgrounds, we conducted a series of descriptive analyses. We examined differences between PKOMW and comparison group students on a range of demographic and classroom level characteristics. There were no significant differences in age (PKOMW: M = 57.62 months, SD = 4.02; Comparison: M = 54.83 months, SD = 7.64), sex, or ethnicity between students in the PKOMW and comparison groups. There was a marginally greater proportion ( p < .10) of DLLs in the comparison group than the PKOMW group (though both conditions had 9 DLLs participating in the study). See Table 1 for differences in demographic characteristics of PKOMW and comparison students. Finally, students in the PKOMW classrooms came from families with higher household income, had parents with higher levels of
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