On this page, I will present some (preliminary) findings related to literacy (reading) development in our sample.
In the first plot, we see the reading fluency scores of all children, across all five time points. Each line represents one child.
We can see that there’s a lot of variation in children’s reading fluency in early primary school.
Now, we want to find out which cognitive skills (and which factors from the home environment) are associated with these individual differences in reading fluency.
To shed some light on this, I’m presenting an animated plot in which the reading fluency scores are shown again, but now a color scale is added. This color scale represents each child’s phonological skills at the first time point (kindergarten). We can see that children who start with ‘low’ phonological skills in kindergarten (in light green) show less fluent reading abilities, and this effect is still visible 2.5 years later, at TP5.
Next, we can make a very similar plot, but now the color scale represents each child’s letter knowledge score at the first time point (kindergarten). We see a very similar pattern: children who start with ‘low’ letter knowledge scores in kindergarten (in light green) show less fluent reading abilities, and this effect is still visible 2.5 years later, at TP5.
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Longitudinal latent profiles:
In our newest paper, we are using repeated-measures LPA (RMLPA) to examine the distinct latent longitudinal profiles in early literacy development across early primary school. In our results, we identified three latent profiles. In the plots below, we can see that the group of ‘struggling’ readers differs from the other two profiles (‘average’ and ‘above average’) mainly in terms of their phonological skills and letter knowledge development over time.
Interestingly, we have also examined the latent longitudinal profiles in early numeracy development across early primary school. These results are shown on the next page. The diagram below shows the associations between the Literacy and Numeracy profiles. It shows the ways in which children from each Literacy profile are represented in the Numeracy profiles, and vice versa.
