Reading Ability Development from Kindergarten to Junior Secondary: Latent Transition Analyses with Growth Mixture Modeling

The present study examined the reading ability development of children in the large scale Early Childhood Longitudinal Study (Kindergarten Class of 1998-99 data; Tourangeau et al., 2009) under the dynamic systems. To depict children's growth pattern, we extended the measurement part of latent transition analysis to the growth mixture model and found that the new model fitted the data well. Results also revealed that most of the children stayed in the same ability group with few cross-level changes in their classes. After adding the environmental factors as predictors, analyses showed that children receiving higher teachers' ratings, with higher socioeconomic status, and of above average poverty status, would have higher probability to transit into the higher ability group.