NO LONGER AVAILABLE
What literacy skills and abilities should preschools and kindergartens aim to develop? What instructional practices have been proven, by research, to confer literacy learning advantages to young children? This webinar will provide answers to these questions based upon the most comprehensive review yet conducted with research on early literacy. The chair of the National Early Literacy Panel will provide participants with a guided tour of their findings.
A decade ago, the National Reading Panel issued its influential report that summarized the research on teaching literacy in grades K-12. That report quickly became the basis of federal and state education policy, and continues to be relied upon by practitioners, researchers, and policymakers. But what about the learning needs of younger children? The National Reading Panel did not examine research that would answer that question, so the National Early Literacy Panel (NELP) was formed. NELP was asked, by the federal government, to determine what research has to say to preschool and kindergarten teachers and parents. NELP set out to find out what knowledge, skills, and abilities that preschoolers need to learn to improve later literacy performance, and to determine what works best in teaching literacy and these precursor skills to young children? This comprehensive synthesis of the research is an important basis for setting educational policies and selecting instructional practices for use with preschoolers and kindergartners. This webinar will summarize and explain the report of the National Early Literacy Panel (the presenter chaired the NELP panel). NELP examined approximately 300 studies that measured early skills and abilities and linked these with later progress in reading and spelling, identifying a small number of essential precursors to literacy learning that every preschool aim to develop. NELP also explored the experimental studies on teaching literacy and its precursors in the preschool and kindergarten years. These studies considered the effectiveness of explicitly teaching children about the alphabetic code (e.g., phonological awareness, letters, sounds); sharing books with young children; home-based efforts to improve literacy; preschool/kindergarten instruction; and language teaching, determining what works in improving performance in literacy and the precursor skills when teaching children, ages 3-5.
