CCL Home > Research Activities > Funded Research
December 2008
Full Report (PDF,1229 KB)
Brochure (PDF, 43 KB)
The purpose of this research project was to determine whether an early educational intervention for children 3 to 4 years of age improved their school readiness upon entering the elementary school system at the Kindergarten level. The study focused on the research priorities of school readiness in literacy through the development and implementation of an innovative early childhood language learning program called the Phonemic and Phonics Instructional Program (PPIP) in selected childcare centres in Ontario, Canada.
We created a language instructional program and administered it to a sample of children in childcare centres. We conducted a randomized control trial to measure learner performance using outcomes measures from the Strategic Teaching and Evaluation of Progress (STEP) literacy assessment as developed by the Center for Urban School Improvement (USI) at the University of Chicago. The outcome measures included Name Assessment (NA), Upper Case Letter Identification (UCLI), Lower Case Letter Identification (LCLI), Lower Case Sound Identification (LCSI), Rhyming Words (RW) and Matching First Sounds (MFS).
The results showed a significant interaction effect for pre-post and group assignment for five of the six outcome measures; namely, UCLI, LCLI, LCSI, RW and MFS. This implies that group membership had a significant influence on the outcome scores. The instruction group scored higher than the control group on all five of the abovementioned measures. We should note that the control group also showed significant gains from the pre-test to post-test for NA, UCLI, and LCLI.