| Popis: |
The purpose of this study was to examine the quality of kindergarteners’ writing and how this changes over the year. I developed a writing rubric to explore children’s writing quality and growth. I explored the nature of quality of kindergartners’ writing at the beginning, middle, and end of kindergarten. I also examined the writings of the children who have lower levels of quality change across time compared to those who enter kindergarten with average and above average quality of writing. Finally, I examined how level of name writing, letter identification, alphabet letter writing, letter-sound knowledge, phonemic awareness, spelling impact writing development and the quality of writing. At the beginning of the year nearly half of children had not yet developed the alphabetic principle. As they began to display the alphabetic principle at the middle of the kindergarten, then their writing improved in quality in all dimensions. Children’s writing quality did develop throughout the academic year. In regard to changes of quality of writing which occurred across the year, the lower level group drastically increased writing quality from Time 1 to Time 2, and from Time 2 to Time 3, compared to the average level group. This result indicated that the children’s writing increased in quality throughout the year as their alphabetic principle developed and expanded. The higher level group increased writing quality from Time 1 to Time 2 less dramatically than the lower and average level groups, because they entered kindergarten already using the alphabetic principle. However, the higher level group drastically increased writing quality from Time 2 to Time 3, compared to the lower and average level group. Interestingly, the main factors contributing to a more drastic increase in the higher level group at Time 3 were the dimensions of quality of picture and quality of relations between drawing and writing. The increase in these foundational literacy scores from the beginning to middle of kindergarten was higher than the increase in these scores from the middle to end of kindergarten. It suggests that these children drastically developed the foundational skills from fall to winter, though kindergarteners still develop their foundational skills from winter to spring. Overall foundational knowledge accounted for less than one-third of the variance in writing quality. The results of this study suggest that the early literacy skills predict some of children’s current and future writing achievements. |
