The effects of Student Readiness Training on the listening comprehension, attending, and social skills of kindergarten students

Statement of the problem. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effects of the Student Readiness Training (SRT) curriculum on the attention, listening comprehension, and social skills of kindergarteners. The SRT curriculum provides training in these three areas. The problem addressed in this study was the lack of prerequisite learning skills, which contributes to poor school performance.;Methods. This study involved 12 intact kindergarten classes (260 students) from three elementary schools in the metropolitan Atlanta area. Six of the classes were randomly selected as comparison groups and six were randomly selected as treatment groups. The demographic characteristics of the three schools were very similar. Each school had two treatment and two comparison classes. The independent variable was the training students receive as described in the SRT curriculum. There were two dependent variables. The first was a listening comprehension measure, a 45-item subtest of the Stanford Early School Achievement Test (SESAT2). The second dependent variable was a behavior checklist, the ADD-H: Comprehensive Teachers Rating Scale. The research design was a 2 x 3 treatment x blocks design (Keppel, 1982). Analysis of covariance was used for statistical analysis.;Results. Students trained with the SRT curriculum scored significantly higher than comparison students on the listening comprehension measure and the student behavior rating scale.;Conclusions. This study demonstrates that entire classrooms of students can be trained in the prerequisite learning skills of attending, listening and responding, and getting along with others (social skills), and as a result show increases in these "school success" behaviors. In addition, students can transfer these new behaviors to increases in achievement (listening comprehension). This study also demonstrates that teachers can be trained to incorporate this training without changing existing curriculum. The results of this study provide evidence that materials and teaching strategies exist that can have a powerful impact on decreasing student underachievement. In addition, one implication of this study is that by starting early (kindergarten) we can equip students with the skills to succeed in school and thus we can preventively address the "at risk" problem.