Date of Award

2002

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Education

Abstract

This study looked at ISTEP+ reading and quantitative test scores of 200 randomly selected Indiana elementary third grade male and female children. The selected data were derived from a total of 838 sets of scores of children from ten urban school settings. The purpose of this study was to investigate differences of school-entry age and later academic school performance on the two youngest groups” of male and female children in Indiana who were age eligible to enter kindergarten. In this study test scores from two adjacent age groups of children who were eligible to begin school on June 1 were studied. The groups were defined as children who were 5 years .25 months when they entered school, with birth dates from December 1 to January 31, and children who were 5 years 0 months, when they entered school, with birth dates from April 1 to May 31. Children born in February and March were not included in the study. Data from a standardized test titled the Indiana Statewide Testing forEducational Progress (ISTEP+) in the form of reading and quantitative scores were obtained. The ISTEP+ test was given in October 2000 and were the most recent scores available for this study. Fifty male and fifty female test scores were selected randomly from the April 1 to May 31 birth dates, and fifty male and fifty female test scores were selected randomly from the December 1 to January 31 birth dates. The independent variables were gender and age. The dependent variables were reading and quantitative scores. The reading and quantitative scores from the data obtained were compared in two separate two by four ANOVA in order to determine mean differences on school academic performance between the two groups of children who took the ISTEP+ test in the fall of the third grade. Using alpha = .05, compared scores showed no significant difference between the two groups of children. Therefore, in this study age at entry in kindergarten showed no effect on reading and quantitative achievement by the third grade.

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