Planned missing data in early literacy interventions: A replication study with an additional gold standard.

<h4>Introduction</h4>In a digital early literacy intervention RCT, children born late preterm fell behind peers when in a control condition, but outperformed them when assigned to the intervention. Results did however not replicate previous findings. Replication is often complicated by r...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Ralph C A Rippe, Inge Merkelbach
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Public Library of Science (PLoS) 2021-01-01
Series:PLoS ONE
Online Access:https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0249175&type=printable
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:<h4>Introduction</h4>In a digital early literacy intervention RCT, children born late preterm fell behind peers when in a control condition, but outperformed them when assigned to the intervention. Results did however not replicate previous findings. Replication is often complicated by resource quality. Gold Standard measures are generally time-intensive and costly, while they closely align with, and are more sensitive to changes in, early literacy and language performance. A planned missing data approach, leaving these gold standard measures incomplete, might aid in addressing the origin(s) of non-replication.<h4>Methods</h4>Participants after consent were 695 p Dutch primary school pupils of normal and late preterm birth. The high-quality measures, in additional to simpler but complete measures, were intentionally administered to a random subsample of children. Five definitions of gold standard alignment were evaluated.<h4>Results</h4>Two out of five gold standard levels improved precision compared to the original results. The lowest gold standard level did not lead to improvement: precision was actually diminished. In two gold standard definitions, an alphabetical factor and a writing-only factor the model estimates were comparable to the original results. Only the most precise definition of the gold standard level replicated the original results.<h4>Conclusion</h4>Gold standard measures could only be used to improve model efficiency in RCT-designs under sufficiently high convergent validity.
ISSN:1932-6203