Sample A: Cover Page of Thesis, Project, or Dissertation Proposal

(i.e., education and experience), and instructional methods (i.e., teaching philosophy and
teacher-child interactions) influence the development of children‘s literacy skills. Further,
the model demonstrated that factors related to children‘s environment and individual
literacy skill development during the preschool period are closely linked with
characteristics of the classroom environment and children‘s literacy abilities throughout
the early primary grades.
In summary, mastering emergent literacy skills during the preschool period is
pivotal to children‘s subsequent literacy and academic achievement. Further, children‘s
literacy skill acquisition and the classroom environment are closely knit factors
influencing children‘s subsequent literacy achievement. In particular, adults acting as
teachers of literacy skills are crucial to children‘s literacy success, not only because they
guide children through the literacy acquisition process using instruction, but also because
they support children through personal relationships.
Importance of Literacy Development for Children Facing Socio-Economic Hardship
Given the importance of developing strong pre-literacy skills on children‘s
transition to school (Morrison et al., 2006), literacy development in preschool-aged
children from families facing socioeconomic hardships is of pivotal concern:
The reason that emergent literacy skills are important for children entering
elementary school is not that children with low levels of those skills cannot
succeed in the task of learning to read. Rather, the reason is that schools provide
an age-graded rather than skills-graded curriculum in which early delays are
magnified at each additional step as the gap increases between what children
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