Is Use of Literacy-Focused Curricula Associated with Children’s Literacy Gains and Are Associations Moderated by Risk Status, Receipt of Intervention, or Preschool Setting?

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Overall, the authors did a good job. My criticisms are mostly in the form of suggestions, because the article is good.

 Abstract: In the abstract, the authors do not mention the sample (number of children/teachers, type of programs) or method (observational, experimental, longitudinal). The reader is left wondering how the data was obtained.

I would suggest to the authors: the abstract points out that limited use is a concern, but it could be more explicit: suggest teacher training, investment in curricula, or integration into early childhood education policies. (suggestion)

line 24 in the key words: Perhaps the authors meant to say curricula? Not cutícula!

Line 280: methods, It would be interesting to know the criteria for excluding participants (were there any losses? dropouts? children without complete data?).

Terminological consistency:

Sometimes you use “preschool children,” sometimes “children aged 3 to 5 years.” It would be good to standardize this (since you mentioned the question of preschool vs. pre-school earlier).

 

Line 500 covariates: (suggestion) The list of covariates is very long and repetitive (e.g., always “child age, GRTR-R, pretest latent score…”). It could be placed in a supplementary table indicating which ones were included for each outcome. A summary in the body of the text would suffice.

Moderation (suggestion):

The section on moderators (risk, intervention, settings) could be clearer if structured in separate paragraphs, rather than as a continuous block, and briefly explaining the rationale for including each one (not just how they were coded).

Discusson 667: Integration with unexpected findings

The fact that there are no effects on emergent writing and that the moderate effects are small (< 0.20) warrants more critical discussion: what does this mean in terms of actual educational relevance?

862 limitations: (personal opinion). One key limitation that deserves greater emphasis is the reliance on teacher self-report to identify curriculum use, without any accompanying measures of fidelity, dosage, or quality of implementation. This limitation is currently mentioned only briefly, but it has substantial implications for the validity of the findings. It is possible that teachers’ reports of curriculum use do not fully reflect the extent to which curricula were implemented as intended, or that substantial variability in how teachers enacted the curricula contributed to the observed associations. As a result, what is being captured may reflect teacher practice or interpretation of curricula, rather than curriculum effects per se. I would encourage the authors to expand this limitation in more depth, as it is arguably more critical to the interpretation of the results than issues such as geographic representativeness.

Conclusions:
The conclusions could explicitly indicate which results support prioritizing interventions for at-risk children. It could also suggest future studies that combine implementation measures with learning outcomes.

Author Response

Thank you so much for the opportunity to address your suggestions! Please see the attachment. 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Please see comments on attachment

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Thank you so much for the opportunity to address your comments and suggestions! Please see the attachment. 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf