Explaining the predictive accuracy of teacher judgments of their students' reading achievement: The role of gender, classroom behavior, and emergent literacy skills in a longitudinal sample of children exposed to poverty

The factors that explain why teachers are able to accurately predict their students' future reading ability were examined in a longitudinal study from first- to third-grade in children exposed to poverty (N = 170). Teacher ratings were similarly based on both their students' emergent literacy skills and classroom behavior. Meanwhile, the influences of classroom behavior on later variability in reading skills were much less than, and almost completely redundant with, prior emergent literacy. Virtually all of the shared variance between teacher ratings and later reading skills was explained by prior levels of emergent literacy. Implications of the results and future research were discussed.