Preschool education has grown exponentially over the last 50 years, demonstrating long-term benefits (Aos, Lieb, Mayfield, & Pennucci, 2004; Barnett, 2008, Camilli, Vargas, Ryan, & Barnett, 2010; Gorey, 2001). Despite the long-term benefits, children are leaving preschool and entering kindergarten with inadequate literacy skills (Carta, Greenwood, & Atwater, 2010). This investigation sought to examine the effect of a class-wide literacy intervention and the intervention's impact on alphabet knowledge, phonological awareness, vocabulary, comprehension, and concepts about print. This study evaluated the impact of preschoolers' emergent literacy skills after the implementation of a hybridized version of two evidence-based curriculums, which have been shown to improve preschool students' alphabet knowledge, phonological awareness, comprehension, vocabulary, and concepts about print. These interventions included the Kindergarten Peer Assisted Literacy Strategies (Mathes, Clancy-Manchetti, & Torgeson, 2001) and Developing Talkers: PreK (The Children's Learning Institute, 2010). The hybridized intervention was administered for 12-weeks in duration for a total of 48 sessions. The first research question focused on the impact of the literacy intervention on specific emergent literacy skills: preschool students' alphabet knowledge, phonological awareness, vocabulary, comprehension, and concepts about print. The second research question examined the overall performance of the experimental group and control group on broader measures of literacy, specifically cumulative scores on non-targeted literacy components (i.e., sight words). The final three research questions compared the experimental and control group scores concerning the proportion of students who met benchmark goals on assessments, as well as the proportion of students who were deemed well below benchmark or below benchmark based on cut scores. The results of the experimental study revealed that participants in both conditions developed emergent literacy skills over the duration of the study. However, the experimental group outperformed the control condition in knowledge of letter sounds, phonological awareness, and vocabulary measures. The results are outlined empirically, with implications for teaching practice and assessment in preschool literacy programs.
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