Effects of Phonological Awareness Training on Early Childhood Educators' Knowledge, Instructional Practice and Student Outcomes

This quasi-experimental study examined the effect of a phonological awareness professional development program on teachers' phonological awareness knowledge, the impact phonological awareness knowledge had on the frequency and complexity of phonological awareness instruction, and the impact the instruction had on students' phonological awareness. The study was conducted within the context of a larger U.S. Department of Education Early Reading First Grant during the third year of the project. The participants in this study included twenty-two early childhood teachers who were employed at eight locations in fourteen classrooms. Participating children included 110 students who ranged between 3- and 5-years old and attended full-time early childhood programming.;The teachers and students were tested prior to and following the teachers' participation in the intervention. Based on the pre-intervention data, the teachers were ranked, matched and assigned to experimental or control conditions. The experimental teachers received 15-hours of phonological awareness training while the control group received an equal number of hours of training that was unrelated to phonological awareness.;Data analysis was completed on the pre- and post-measures of teacher phonological awareness knowledge, classroom phonological awareness implementation, and student phonological awareness. The results of the study revealed that the professional development training significantly increased teachers' phonological knowledge; and the teachers' increased knowledge resulted in gains of both the frequency and complexity of phonological instructional implementation. In addition, the teachers' phonological awareness implementation significantly impacted students' phonological awareness of beginning sound awareness skills but not rhyme awareness skills.