Description of the sample
The initial sample consisted of 531 Latino kindergarten children from a Texas
border town who were participants in three different instructional programs.
Children were selected for the study on the basis of the type of program present in
their classroom and entire classrooms of children were tested. Most children in this
school district had very limited knowledge of English at the outset of kindergarten.
The school district determined a child’s level of proficiency in English and Spanish
for placement purposes at the beginning of kindergarten by means of the Stanford
English Language Proficiency Test (SELP; Harcourt Educational Assessment, 2003)
and the Stanford Spanish Language Proficiency Test (SSLP; Harcourt Educational
Assessment, 2005) along with teacher evaluations and observations. SELP and
SSLP scores can be converted into five proficiency levels: leve1 1 (pre-emergent),
level 2 (emergent), level 3 (basic), level 4 (intermediate), and level 5 (proficient).
Using the modified Angoff procedure, the test developers created the SELP’s
proficiency levels by obtaining the consensus of a panel of experts. The panel rated
the test’s items based on what students at specific grade and proficiency levels
should know (Stephenson, 2003). For the current analyses, we excluded the 29
children in our sample that scored above level 3 in English proficiency. Children at
level 3 and below are considered non-proficient and retaining these children resulted
in our final sample of 502.