Emerging Readers: A Look into Emergent Literacy Scores of Kindergarten Students Who Attended an Urban School District Pre-Kindergarten and Their Classmates

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to determine the effect of pre-kindergarten on emergent literacy scores of children at an urban school. The need for the study was prompted by experts in early childhood about whether children that attended prekindergarten had an advantage over their peers that entered kindergarten without the prekindergarten experience. Forty-seven kindergarten students who attend school in an, urban school district in upstate New York were the subjects in the study. Twenty-three of those students attended pre-kindergarten and twenty-four entered kindergartens without prekindergarten. The Emergent Literacy Survey was administered to all forty-seven subjects in September and November. The data were then analyzed to see if there was a significant difference between the two groups. A test of the null hypothesis found that there was not a statistically significant difference between literacy scores of pre-kindergarten and traditional kindergarten students.