An Epidemiological and Longitudinal Study of Rural Child Literacy Trajectories

描述（申请人提供）：小学是为孩子未来学业成功奠定基础的关键时期。在这一时期发展的最重要的学术技能是读写能力，没有读写能力，大多数其他内容领域的材料都无法很好地学习。研究发现，读写能力的发展轨迹往往在小学早期就固定下来了，尤其是对那些有读写能力风险的孩子来说。对于生活在低财富农村社区的儿童来说，在儿童中期，识字率固定下降的趋势尤其普遍，其中许多是非洲裔美国人。在儿童中期有一些重要的过程在起作用，可以帮助我们理解儿童不同的读写途径。这个特殊的发展时期对我们理解儿童技能、教育和父母教养如何相互作用以塑造识字能力至关重要。该项目利用了从出生以来一直跟踪调查的农村贫困儿童的大量代表性样本所收集的数据。“家庭生活项目”是一个由联合国儿童发展中心资助的为期11年的项目。这一精心挑选的样本采用流行病学框架，从居住在六个贫困农村县之一的母亲所生的每个婴儿中招募具有代表性的样本。参与FLP的1292名儿童拥有从出生到一年级的广泛数据，包括：从6个月到一年级观察到的家庭养育投入（敏感性、语言投入和父母资源），从幼儿园到三年级观察到的课堂教学质量，从幼儿园到三年级教师对识字教学时间和内容的评价；以及从k -3年级开始的词汇、单词识别和阅读理解方面的儿童读写能力。拟议的项目将增加对五年级教学质量的观察和教师对教学的评价，以及对五年级和七年级儿童识字技能的评估。通过我们对家庭、父母、学校、教室和教师的特征的研究，我们将能够更好地解释从小学到中学，不同种族、贫困、性别以及学校贫困程度的儿童成就的不同轨迹。了解小学早期和晚期教学质量在预测识字技能方面是否更重要，以及整个小学的教学质量是否仍然对七年级以后的识字能力有影响，将是重要的探索。此外，与其他儿童相比，了解高质量的教学对读写能力较低的儿童是否更重要，以及在预测读写能力方面，教学对其他风险群体（非裔美国人、贫困状况、性别和学校贫困）是否更重要，这一点至关重要。该项目将有助于我们理解在小学期间观察到的特定儿童技能X教师教学互动是否可以预测低收入农村地区儿童在小学和中学期间的识字成绩，超越父母和人口统计协变量。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Elementary school is the critical period for setting the stage for children's future academic success. The most important academic skill that is developed during this period is literacy, without which most other content area material cannot be learned well. Research has found that literacy trajectories often become fixed in early elementary school, especially for children at risk. A fixed downward path in literacy during middle childhood is especially prevalent for children living in low-wealth rural communities, many of whom are African American. There are important processes at play during this middle childhood period that can help us understand children's diverging literacy pathways. This particular developmental period is critical to our understanding of how child skills, instruction, and parenting may interact to shape the emerging competence in literacy. This project capitalizes on the data already collected on a large representative sample of children living in rural poverty who have been followed since birth. The Family Life Project has been an 11 year program project funded by NICHD. This carefully selected sample used an epidemiological frame to recruit a representative sample of every baby born to a mother who resided in one of six poor rural counties. The 1292 children in the FLP have extensive data from birth on children's development, including: observed parenting input in the home (sensitivity, language input, and parent resources) from 6 months to 1st grade, observed quality of instruction in the classroom from K through 3rd grade, teacher ratings of literacy instructional time and content from K through 3rd grade; and child literacy skills in vocabulary, word recognition and reading comprehension from K-3rd grade. The proposed project would add observed quality of instruction and teacher ratings of instruction in 5th grade as well as assessed child literacy skils at 5th grade and 7th grade. Through our examination of the characteristics of families, parenting, schools, classrooms, and teachers, we will be able to better account for the different trajectories in child achievement by race, poverty, and gender as well as by school poverty level throughout elementary school and into middle school. Understanding whether early vs. later quality of instruction in elementary school is more important in predicting literacy skills as wellas whether the quality of instruction across elementary school still has an influence in accounting for later 7th grade literacy will be important to explore. Furthermore, it is critically important o understand whether high quality of instruction is more important for children with lower literacy skills in comparison to other children as well as whether instruction is more important for our other risk groups (African American, poverty status, gender and school poverty) in predicting literacy skills. This project will contribute uniquely to our understanding of whether specific observed child skill X teacher instruction interactions during elementary school predict literacy achievement in children in low-wealth rural areas during elementary school and into middle school, above and beyond parenting and demographic covariates.