One Hundred Children: baseline assessment of literacy in the early years of education

One Hundred Children is an Australian study of literacy learning in the early years of education. The larger study (Hill, Comber, Louden, Reid and Rivalland, 1998) includes detailed case studies of children’s literacy learning in their homes, pre-schools, day-care centres and schools. This paper reports on the assessment framework developed during the study and provides a brief overview of children’s performance on items in that framework. The study demonstrates that most children made rapid and substantial progress in literacy learning and identifies the literacy domains in which children learned most during their first year at school. A number of advantages of the use of baseline measures for assessing young children’s progress in literacy are also highlighted.