Research consistently documents that girls outperform boys in literacy achievement, yet, when considering the starting point--early literacy--we do not have consensus on the origin, meaningful nature, or persistence of such differences. In this two-part study analyzing 5,816 Norwegian students (48.1% girls, average age of 6.1 years), we first…

We investigated the associations between teacher-rated and direct assessments of early elementary students' speech and language skills to explore whether using teachers as primary screeners yielded assessment data that reliably identified young students with language difficulties who many need a more comprehensive evaluation. We assessed first-…