This investigation was undertaken to evaluate the effectiveness of the Teacher's School Readiness Inventory (TSRI), an empirically derived five-item questionnaire, in identifying at-risk or failure-prone preschool children. Four samples totalling 453 children, screened with the TSRI in the spring of either pre-kindergarten or kindergarten, were followed through the end of first grade. The evidence showed, first, that scores on the TSRI produced an average correlation of .58 with the children's performance across the first grade curriculum and, second, that the cutoff points on this inventory correctly identified 73% to 90% of those preschool children whose subsequent work in first grade placed them at or near the bottom of the class while achieving an overall hit rate of 86%.
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