| A growing body of evidence suggests that phonological awareness can be accurately described as a single, unitary construct (Anthony and Lonigan, 2004: Lonigan, Burgess, Anthony, and Barker, 1998; Schatschneider et al., 1999). Most of the phonological awareness research has drawn samples from schools where the students have been clustered together in classrooms. This nesting of children within classrooms is inherent in the majority of educational studies and yet the use of multi-level models in phonological awareness research is almost nonexistent. The current project examined the nature of phonological awareness in an English speaking sample using multi-level methods. The dimensionality of phonological awareness and the relative difficulty of the phonological tasks used in this study were examined using multilevel models.;The data consisted of responses to phonological awareness tasks from 3313 students in 455 classrooms from three previous studies. Grade levels for the sample ranged from kindergarten to third grade. The mean age was 6.90 years and the sample was 46.85% female. With respect to ethnicity the sample was 70.27% African-American, 13.61% Caucasian, 10.50% Hispanic, 4.56% Asian, and 1.06% other. Multilevel CFA was used to compare a model with a single construct at both levels against a model with analysis and synthesis factors as described by Wagner et al. (1993) at both levels. Model two would not converge and was modified to have a single factor at the between level. The modified model provided a better fit to the data than did the first model ( c21 = 959.02, p < .05). However, similar to the findings of Schatschneider et al. (1999), the two factors share over 82% of common variance. With such a high percentage of common variance it is reasonable to view phonological awareness as a unitary construct. Further analyses also mirrored the results of Schatschneider et al. (1999). With respect to the IRT results, it was found that the phonological awareness tasks represent a set of increasingly difficult tasks. |
