Empirically-Derived, Person-Oriented Patterns of School Readiness in Typically-Developing Children: Description and Prediction to First-Grade Achievement

摘要

School readiness assessment is a prominent feature of early childhood education. Because the construct of readiness is multifaceted, we examined children's patterns on multiple indicators previously found to be both theoretically and empirically linked to school readiness: social skill, interactions with parents, problem behavior, and performance on tests of cognition and attention. Multistage cluster analysis with independent replications was used to empirically identify normative profiles in a sample of 964 typically developing 54-month-old children. This procedure considered how the aforementioned indicators operate in concert by accounting for the nonlinear multivariate relations among them. Results supported six common (or core) profile types that satisfied all formal heuristic and statistical criteria, including complete coverage, satisfactory within-type homogeneity, between-type dissimilarity, and replicability. Resulting profiles suggest that cognitive process and self regulation develop somewhat independently, resulting in profiles that reveal both linkage and independence of these areas of development. A summary of the defining characteristics for each profile is provided. In addition, the performance of children comprising different profiles was investigated on three concurrent achievement measures to further substantiate the external validity of the resulting configurations. Because readiness connotes a link to the future, predictive validity was examined by evaluating differences between profile types on three achievement measures collected in first grade. Results are discussed in the context of a compensatory hypothesis, one which acknowledges that there is more than one route to successful, or at least adequate, educational outcome among typically developing children.