Scientific Support
Read It Again-PreK! is based on the latest scientific knowledge regarding how adults can support children's language and literacy development using systematic and explicit instruction presented in highly meaningful literacy events, such as storybook reading (Justice & Ezell, 2000, 2002). Read It Again-PreK! focuses on the skill areas of narrative, vocabulary, print knowledge, and phonological awareness. A national panel of research scientists reviewing over 200 studies found these skills to be among the most important in preparing young children for later success in reading (National Early Literacy Panel, 2009). Additionally, the scope and sequence of instruction is well aligned with research findings showing the importance of systematic instruction to promoting children's short- and long-term developmental achievements in language and literacy.
Read It Again-PreK! organizes all lessons around adult-child readings of high quality storybooks. Scientific findings point to shared storybook reading as an important activity that promotes children's language and literacy development. Importantly, however, science also tells us that the way in which most adults use storybooks does not always take full advantage of their potential as a teaching tool. Read It Again-PreK! provides a means of enhancing adult-child storybook reading to make it a more powerful tool for promoting children's language and literacy skills. The ways in which Read It Again-PreK! enhances storybook read alouds is based on research from leaders in the fields of early education, developmental psychology, speech-language pathology, and reading disabilities.
Importantly, we have evidence to indicate that teachers' use of Read It Again-PreK! has positive benefits for children. In a quasi-experimental study involving 20 teachers and 137 children participating in preschool programs in West Virginia, researchers found that children in classrooms using Read It Again-PreK! outperformed children in comparison classrooms on standardized measures of grammar, vocabulary, print knowledge, rhyme, and alliteration skills at the end of the preschool year (Justice, McGinty, Cabell, Kilday, Knighton, & Huffman, 2009). The figure below depicts the differential gains (based on raw scores) for children Read It Again-PreK! compared to those who received their typical classroom curriculum on three measures of oral language.
Note: Language measures comprised three subtests of the standardized norm-referenced Clinical Evaluation of
Language Fundamentals Preschool - Second Edition (CELF Preschool-2; Wiig, Secord, & Semel, 2004), namely, Sentence Structure,
Expressive Vocabulary, and Word Structure (grammar, vocabulary, and morphology, respectively). Graph depicts gains on raw scores
from fall
Similar patterns were apparent for measures of emergent literacy. The figure below depicts the differential gains (based on raw scores) for children receiving Read It Again-PreK! compared to those who received their typical classroom curriculum on four measures of emergent literacy.
Note: Rhyme and alliteration scores from Individual Growth and Development Indicators (Early Childhood Research Institute on Measuring
Growth and Development, 2000), no maximum score; alphabet knowledge scores from Phonological Awareness Literacy Screening
(Invernizzi, Meier, & Sullivan, 2004), maximum = 26; print concepts scores from Preschool Word and Print Awareness (Justice & Ezell, 2001)
, maximum = 17