Selecting appropriate phonological awareness indicators for the kindergarten cohort of the national educational panel study: A theoretical and empirical approach

Abstract

Language is the central medium for lifelong learning and consequently significantly impacts on the cognitive-academic and socio-emotional development of an individual. Thus, the assessment of language competencies is one major focus of the measurement of competencies in the German National Educational Panel Study (NEPS). Since reading literacy in the lingua franca of society is essential in order to achieve academic goals, acquire knowledge, and participate in society, this competency is assessed coherently over the lifespan in the NEPS. However, in Germany, reading is not taught before formal schooling. Therefore, reading competencies cannot be assessed in preschool or Kindergarten. Instead, phonological awareness is measured as a precursor variable of reading competence and oral language (receptive vocabulary, grammar) as well as more general literacy indicators. Although a broad range of tests and subscales for assessing phonological awareness exist, not all of them are suitable for the assessment within the framework of a large-scale educational study. Most well-established measures for assessing phonological awareness in preschool age are designed as screening instruments and/or indicators within therapeutic settings. Thus, the items are very easy, distinguishing exclusively children who show below-average performances. In this paper, a theoretical and data-driven approach is presented to select phonological awareness tasks appropriate for the NEPS Starting Cohort 2—Kindergarten cohort. To identify tasks that comprise high psychometric quality, allow for differentiating performances at a broad range of competence levels of phonological awareness, and differ in their relationship to other language indicators, a small study (n = 164) was conducted. Based on a two-dimensional model of phonological awareness (Stackhouse & Wells, 1997), five different types of tasks varying in (a) the size of the linguistic unit to be reflected on and (b) the specific cognitive operation to be applied were selected and empirically compared. Statistical analy-sis showed two tasks to be appropriate for our goals: blending of onsets and rimes and identification of phonemes. The results are discussed in line with theoretical considerations concerning the types of tasks and against the background of the two-dimensional model of phonological awareness. The findings suggest that presumably more than two factors must be included in the model for a suitable prediction of task difficulty.