Health and environmental effects on the academic readiness of school-age children

Secondary analysis was used to examine how health and environmental risk affect mathematics and reading readiness in a sample of 867 5- and 6-year-old children from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. Measures of risk included low birth weight, length of hospitalization at birth, rehospitalization during the first year of life, family income, maternal education, and the quality of the home environment. Although academic readiness was largely explained by environmental risk, child morbidity had a significant independent impact on reading performance. Furthermore, interaction analyses indicated that child morbidity was predictive of poor mathematics performance only for children from impoverished homes. In contrast, results also indicated that low birth weight children may be less able to benefit from higher levels of maternal education in terms of reading performance. These findings are discussed in the context of developmental risk.