Attendance, performance and the acquisition of early literacy skills: A comparison of Indigenous and non-Indigenous school children

Abstract

As part of an evaluation of a web-based early literacy intervention, ABRACADABRA, a small exploratory study was conducted over one term in three primary schools in the Northern Territory. Of particular concern was the relationship between attendance and the acquisition of early literacy skills of Indigenous and non-Indigenous children. Using the GRADE literacy assessment, it was found that students made significant gains in a number of early literacy skills (e.g. phonological awareness skills and vocabulary processing). Classroom attendance was strongly and positively correlated with the acquisition of phonological awareness skills and early literacy skills (e.g. letter recognition, word identification processing). Indigenous children attended class significantly less frequently than non-Indigenous children and performed significantly worse overall, particularly with regard to phonological processing tasks. In light of these findings, it is suggested irregular attendance contributed to the Indigenous students' lowered literacy acquisition.

Notes

1. At post-test, a reduced sample size (n = 6) prevented meaningful analysis of level.

2. In this and in all other correlation analyses, gains in listening performance were not calculated here. There were two main reasons for this. First, we were primarily interested in the relationship between school attendance and gains in literacy performance and second, in order to avoid a Type II error, it was necessary to minimize the number of comparisons for Bonferroni adjustment (Blaikie, 2003).

3. A one-way ANOVA indicated no differences in age between the GRADE levels of P, K and 1, F < 1.

1. Some caution must be taken when interpreting these results. It may have been the case that more items were in fact misfitting but were undetectable due to a relatively small sample size.