Kindergartners' Preacademic Skills and Mainstreamed Teachers' Knowledge: Implications for Special Educators

Abstract

This article addresses the need to identify the academic skills displayed by normally developing children in order to successfully prepare and place handicapped preschoolers into mainstreamed kindergartens. In order to determine kindergartners' entry level skills, a sample of 25 children designated by their teacher as "average" was tested early in the school year using items from the Brigance Diagnostic Inventory of Basic Skills (1977) and the Brigance Inventory of Early Development (1978). The children's teachers (n = 18) were asked to indicate on a checklist those items (matched to the Brigance) that they believed the children could correctly perform. More than 80 % of children's answers were correct on 21 of the 34 items, despite the fact that the stated mastery levels on most of the 21 items indicated that they would not be mastered until the first or second grade. Only 7 items were missed by more than half of the children. There was a high positive correlation between children's skills and teachers' estimates of their skills, but teachers underestimated children's performance on 16 of the 21 items. Teachers overestimated children's performance on 14 of the 34 total items. Implications are discussed for preparing handicapped preschool. ers for integration into classrooms in which average children are highly skilled. It is suggested that information about the skills exhibited by normally developing children would be useful to both mainstream and early intervention teachers.