Abstract:

School readiness, involves the set of necessary prerequisites for a child in order to be able to successfully transition to the schooling experience. Early experiences and the direct environment in which the child develops (family and local community influence brain development establishing the neural connections that provide the foundation for language, reasoning, problem solving, social skills, behavior and emotional health). Language proficiency, and early literacy and numeracy skills, at kindergarten are also found to be good predictors of children’s attainment throughout their educational careers.

The concept of ‘school readiness’, thus inevitably involves the complex, interdisciplinary and inter-depending relations between the child, school and family and leads to a dynamic perspective of this system, whose parts are inter-subsidized with the final aim to achieve the integration of the child into the Primary school system. Towards this end, it is important to have an overall evaluation of child’s readiness to enter this system before their integration; such an evaluation should be able to diagnose problems and in such cases the child could be adequately serviced to remedy their problems but also would be given access to the necessary support when he/she enters the primary school. Such an evaluation does not exist for the Cypriot educational system and this is a gap we are addressing with this work.

In particular, we consider the multidimensional view of school readiness which sets the context for this work, and we present the results of our study which aims to establish a reliable diagnostic test for school readiness for Cypriot kindergarten children entering the primary school. This instrument was administered to students in two parts:
(a) an individual oral test examining basic general knowledge, short term memory, basic linguistic, cognitive and mathematical competences, acoustic segregation, phonetic perception, sound acquisition and distinction, acoustic memory, description, narration, crisis and behavior, and
(b) a common group written test examining basic mathematic and linguistic skills as well as pre-writing, pre-mathematic and pre-reading skills. The second part also evaluates fine mobility, eye-hand co-ordination, knowledge, comprehension and implementation of directives, time of activities, behavior, attitudes of work, as well as the way of confrontation of situations and concentration.

We will present our instrument and report on the results of our pilot investigations with a sample of 128 children aged 5.5 to 6.5 years old. Our methods and analysis include both the use of the Rasch model for the validation of our constructed school readiness measures, as well as further statistical models for the for the comparison of children of various backgrounds on these measures. We conclude with a discussion of our main findings and the implications from the use of the constructed measures for potential language disorders, and identification of possible weaknesses at the four measurable aspects of school readiness (cognitive, language, motor and emotional).

Keywords:

School readiness, transition to primary school, language skills, cognitive skills, motor skills, physical skills, social skills, multidimensional.