Tag Archives: Preschool

University of Chicago study: Kindergarteners are not challenged in math

There is a battle brewing regarding whether kindergarten should be more challenging. Moi posted in University of Virginia research: Kindergarten is the new first grade:
Children are not “mini mes” or short adults. They are children and they should have time to play, to dream, and to use their imagination. Alison Gopnik has an excellent article in Slate which reports about the results of two new studies, Why Preschool Shouldn’t Be Like School:

In the first study, MIT professor Laura Schulz, her graduate student Elizabeth Bonawitz, and their colleagues looked at how 4-year-olds learned about a new toy with four tubes. Each tube could do something interesting: If you pulled on one tube it squeaked, if you looked inside another tube you found a hidden mirror, and so on. For one group of children, the experimenter said: “I just found this toy!” As she brought out the toy, she pulled the first tube, as if by accident, and it squeaked. She acted surprised (“Huh! Did you see that? Let me try to do that!”) and pulled the tube again to make it squeak a second time. With the other children, the experimenter acted more like a teacher. She said, “I’m going to show you how my toy works. Watch this!” and deliberately made the tube squeak. Then she left both groups of children alone to play with the toy. …
As so often happens in science, two studies from different labs, using different techniques, have simultaneously produced strikingly similar results. They provide scientific support for the intuitions many teachers have had all along: Direct instruction really can limit young children’s learning. Teaching is a very effective way to get children to learn something specific—this tube squeaks, say, or a squish then a press then a pull causes the music to play. But it also makes children less likely to discover unexpected information and to draw unexpected conclusions….
These experts in machine learning argue that learning from teachers first requires you to learn about teachers. For example, if you know how teachers work, you tend to assume that they are trying to be informative. When the teacher in the tube-toy experiment doesn’t go looking for hidden features inside the tubes, the learner unconsciously thinks: “She’s a teacher. If there were something interesting in there, she would have showed it to me.” These assumptions lead children to narrow in, and to consider just the specific information a teacher provides. Without a teacher present, children look for a much wider range of information and consider a greater range of options.
Knowing what to expect from a teacher is a really good thing, of course: It lets you get the right answers more quickly than you would otherwise. Indeed, these studies show that 4-year-olds understand how teaching works and can learn from teachers. But there is an intrinsic trade-off between that kind of learning and the more wide-ranging learning that is so natural for young children. Knowing this, it’s more important than ever to give children’s remarkable, spontaneous learning abilities free rein. That means a rich, stable, and safe world, with affectionate and supportive grown-ups, and lots of opportunities for exploration and play. Not school for babies. http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2011/03/why_preschool_shouldnt_be_like_school.html

In the rush to produce baby Einsteins and child prodigies, perhaps we are missing the creativity that play activities by preschoolers produces.
https://drwilda.com/2014/02/03/university-of-virginia-research-kindergarten-is-the-new-first-grade/
Admittedly, these studies deal with preschool. Still, there is a rush to require more and more structured learning earlier.

Annie Murphy Paul reported in the New York Times article, Research on Children and Math: Underestimated and Unchallenged:

We hear a lot about how American students lag behind their international peers academically, especially in subjects like math. In the most recent Program for International Student Assessment, commonly known as PISA, students in the United States ranked 26th out of 34 countries in mathematics. On the surface, it would seem that we’re a nation of math dullards; simply no good at the subject. But a spate of new research suggests that we may be underestimating our students, especially the youngest ones, in terms of their ability to think about numbers.
A study published in the April issue of the American Educational Research Journal, for example, finds that kindergarten students learn more when they are exposed to challenging content such as advanced number concepts and even addition and subtraction. In turn, elementary school students who were taught more sophisticated math as kindergarteners made bigger gains in mathematics, reported the study’s lead author, Amy Claessens of the University of Chicago.
Another study, published last year by Dr. Claessens with co-authors Mimi Engel and Maida Finch, concluded that as things stand, many children in kindergarten are being taught information they already know. The “vast majority” of kindergarteners have already mastered counting numbers and recognizing shapes before they set foot in the classroom, Dr. Claessens and her co-authors noted, yet kindergarten teachers report spending much of their math teaching time on these skills.
The students don’t gain anything from going over familiar ground: In the article published this month, Dr. Claessens and her colleagues report that pupils do not benefit from basic content coverage, but that all the kindergarteners in the study, regardless of economic background or initial skill level, did benefit from exposure to more advanced content….
Young students are ready to learn more advanced math concepts, as long as they are presented in an engaging, developmentally appropriate way. The next time we lament the performance of older American students, we could think instead about how to improve the math instruction given to their younger brothers and sisters. http://parenting.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/04/03/research-on-children-and-math-underestimated-and-unchallenged/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0

See, Study Finds That Kindergarten is Too Easy
http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/inside-school-research/2014/02/kindergarten_is_too_easy.html

Citation:

A more recent version of this article was published on [04-02-2014]
Academic Content, Student Learning, and the Persistence of Preschool Effects
1. Amy Claessens
1. University of Chicago
1. Mimi Engel
2. F. Chris Curran
1. Vanderbilt University
Abstract
Little research has examined the relationship between academic content coverage in kindergarten and student achievement. Using nationally representative data, we examine the association between reading and mathematics content coverage in kindergarten and student learning, both overall and for students who attended preschool, Head Start, or participated in other child care prior to kindergarten entry. We find that all children benefit from exposure to advanced content in reading and mathematics and that students do not benefit from basic content coverage. Interestingly, this is true regardless of whether they attended preschool, began kindergarten with more advanced skills, or are from families with low income. Policy implications are discussed.
academic content
student achievement
kindergarten
preschool
Article Notes
Received November 12, 2012.
Revision received August 20, 2013.
Accepted October 13, 2013.

Here is the press release from the University of Chicago:

More challenging content in kindergarten boosts later performance
By Wen Huang
MARCH 17, 2014
Children of all economic backgrounds could score bigger gains in math and reading if teachers introduced more advanced content in kindergarten, according to a new study from the Harris School of Public Policy Studies.
When kindergarten teachers neglect advanced content, children tend to stagnate in reading performance later in elementary school, said study co-author Amy Claessens, assistant professor of public policy at Chicago Harris. Those students also gain less in mathematics than students whose kindergarten experience included more advanced content.
According to Claessens, “basic content” is defined as skills that more than half of the children entering kindergarten have mastered. If the majority of children have not yet grasped it, the content is considered to be advanced.
“There have been many studies of the effects of full-day kindergarten and reduced class size on student learning during kindergarten,” Claessens said. “But we know relatively little about the role of content coverage during the kindergarten years.”
Using the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study–Kindergarten Cohort, a nationally representative sample of kindergarteners, Claessens and her co-authors, Mimi Engel and Chris Curran from Vanderbilt University, examined the reading and math content covered in kindergarten classrooms and how they relate to later changes in children’s academic achievement.
The authors also looked at whether exposure to advanced content in reading and mathematics would enable kindergarten children to maintain and extend the advantages acquired from attending preschool programs.
The results indicate that adding four more days per month on advanced topics in reading or mathematics is associated with moderate increases of test score gains.
Claessens believes changing content coverage is a potentially easy and low-cost means to improve student achievement in kindergarten and beyond, especially compared with options such as lengthening the school day or reducing class size.
“At a time when education programs are facing budget constraints, this is a more viable option,” Claessens said. “Teachers could increase their time on advanced content while reducing time on basic content, without the need to increase overall instructional time, and do so in a developmentally appropriate way for young kids.”
The paper, “Academic Content, Student Learning, and the Persistence of Preschool Effects,” was published in the American Educational Research Journal.
Tags
Amy Claessens, Chicago Harris, Early childhood, early education, Harris School of Public Policy Studies, kindergarten
Media Contact
Wen Huang
News Officer for Law, Policy and Economics
News Office, University Communications
wenh@uchicago.edu
7737025341
Reserved for members of the media.
On Topic
UChicago’s Program on Global Environment shapes national Green Restaurant certification
March 20, 2014
The University of Chicago
© 2014 The University of Chicago

The University of Chicago
Edward H. Levi Hall
5801 South Ellis Avenue
Chicago, Illinois 60637
(773) 702-1234
 Contact Us
 Feedback
 RSS Feeds
– See more at: http://news.uchicago.edu/article/2014/03/17/more-challenging-content-kindergarten-boosts-
later-performance#sthash.zREtMpST.dpuf

Claudio Sanchez of NPR reported in the story, What The U.S. Can Learn From Finland, Where School Starts At Age 7:

Finland, a country the size of Minnesota, beats the U.S. in math, reading and science, even though Finnish children don’t start school until age 7.
Despite the late start, the vast majority arrive with solid reading and math skills. By age 15, Finnish students outperform all but a few countries on international assessments…. http://www.npr.org/2014/03/08/287255411/what-the-u-s-can-learn-from-finland-where-school-starts-at-age-7

We must not so over-schedule children that they have no time to play and to dream.

‘Redshirting’ kindergarteners
https://drwilda.com/tag/redshirting-holding-kids-back-from-kindergarten/

The state of preschool education is dire
https://drwilda.wordpress.com/2012/04/10/the-state-of-preschool-education-is-dire/

The ‘whole child’ approach to education
https://drwilda.wordpress.com/2012/02/10/the-whole-child-approach-to-education/

Where information leads to Hope. © Dr. Wilda.com

Dr. Wilda says this about that ©

Blogs by Dr. Wilda:

COMMENTS FROM AN OLD FART©
http://drwildaoldfart.wordpress.com/

Dr. Wilda Reviews ©
http://drwildareviews.wordpress.com/

Dr. Wilda ©
http://drwilda.com

Tags: Academic Content, Amy Claessens, and the Persistence of Preschool Effects, Early Childhood Education, Early Learning, Is Kindergarten the New First Grade? Researchers Say Yes, Kindergarten, Preschool, Research on Children and Math: Underestimated and Unchallenged, Student Learning, The Changing Nature of Kindergarten in the Age of Accountability, University of Virginia, What The U.S. Can Learn From Finland, Where School Starts At Age 7, Why Preschool Shouldn't Be Like School

Comments Leave a Comment
Categories Dr Wilda

University of Virginia research: Kindergarten is the new first grade

3 Feb

Children are not “mini mes” or short adults. They are children and they should have time to play, to dream, and to use their imagination. Alison Gopnik has an excellent article in Slate which reports about the results of two new studies, Why Preschool Shouldn’t Be Like School:

In the first study, MIT professor Laura Schulz, her graduate student Elizabeth Bonawitz, and their colleagues looked at how 4-year-olds learned about a new toy with four tubes. Each tube could do something interesting: If you pulled on one tube it squeaked, if you looked inside another tube you found a hidden mirror, and so on. For one group of children, the experimenter said: “I just found this toy!” As she brought out the toy, she pulled the first tube, as if by accident, and it squeaked. She acted surprised (“Huh! Did you see that? Let me try to do that!”) and pulled the tube again to make it squeak a second time. With the other children, the experimenter acted more like a teacher. She said, “I’m going to show you how my toy works. Watch this!” and deliberately made the tube squeak. Then she left both groups of children alone to play with the toy. …
As so often happens in science, two studies from different labs, using different techniques, have simultaneously produced strikingly similar results. They provide scientific support for the intuitions many teachers have had all along: Direct instruction really can limit young children’s learning. Teaching is a very effective way to get children to learn something specific—this tube squeaks, say, or a squish then a press then a pull causes the music to play. But it also makes children less likely to discover unexpected information and to draw unexpected conclusions….
These experts in machine learning argue that learning from teachers first requires you to learn about teachers. For example, if you know how teachers work, you tend to assume that they are trying to be informative. When the teacher in the tube-toy experiment doesn’t go looking for hidden features inside the tubes, the learner unconsciously thinks: “She’s a teacher. If there were something interesting in there, she would have showed it to me.” These assumptions lead children to narrow in, and to consider just the specific information a teacher provides. Without a teacher present, children look for a much wider range of information and consider a greater range of options.
Knowing what to expect from a teacher is a really good thing, of course: It lets you get the right answers more quickly than you would otherwise. Indeed, these studies show that 4-year-olds understand how teaching works and can learn from teachers. But there is an intrinsic trade-off between that kind of learning and the more wide-ranging learning that is so natural for young children. Knowing this, it’s more important than ever to give children’s remarkable, spontaneous learning abilities free rein. That means a rich, stable, and safe world, with affectionate and supportive grown-ups, and lots of opportunities for exploration and play. Not school for babies. http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2011/03/why_preschool_shouldnt_be_like_school.html

In the rush to produce baby Einsteins and child prodigies, perhaps we are missing the creativity that play activities by preschoolers produces.

Sarah D. Sparks reported in the Education Week article, Is Kindergarten the New First Grade? Researchers Say Yes:

The days when kindergarten focused on playing and finger painting may be waning, as early-learning classrooms devote significantly more attention to preparing students to read, according to a new University of Virginia study.
From 1998 to 2006, kindergarten teachers reported devoting 25 percent more time to teaching early literacy, from 5.5 hours to seven hours per week, according to the working paper by Daphna Bassok, an assistant professor at the University of Virginia’s Curry School of Education and Anna Rorem, a policy associate at the university’s Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service.
The researchers analyzed changes over time in teacher expectations, curriculum, and students’ time on task using data from the federal Early Childhood Longitudinal Study.
Though the overall time for kindergarten has increased since the late 1990s, with 75 percent of kindergartners now attending full-day classes—up from 56 percent in 1998—the researchers found that time devoted to mathematics flatlined and time for all other non-literacy subjects decreased: Kindergartners today now spend as much time on reading and language arts as they do on mathematics, science, social studies, music, and art combined.Time for the last four subjects dropped by 30 minutes per week for each of those subjects except for math.The percentage of teachers who reported their students never received physical education more than tripled, from 14 percent to 45 percent (and as the mother of a young son, I don’t even want to think about a class of 5-year-olds who don’t get their wriggles worn out regularly).

This change in curriiculum is particularly interesting considering that these data sets counted an integrated activity—say, a science experiment that included reading—for both subjects. So why the focus on reading to the exclusion of other topics?
Other findings suggest federal, state, and district accountabilty pressures and state initiatives to “read on grade level by 3rd grade” may have narrowed the focus. Bassok and Rorem found that the number of early-education teachers who believe students should begin learning to read in kindergarten more than doubled from 1998 to 2006, from 31 percent in 1998 to 65 percent in 2006. The teachers also became more likely to teach spelling and use standardized assessments in kindergarten, they found.
What I find telling is that, while kindergarten teachers became more and more likely to consider academic skills like knowing the alphabet, colors, and shapes vital for students to learn in the earliest grades, they still rated them as less crucial than skills associated with self-regulation—following directions, sitting still, and completing tasks, for example. As the entry point to school, kindergarten is still the place where children are learning to raise their hands and color inside the lines. Yet as more students attend preschool at ages 2, 3, and 4, academic expectations for kindergarten may continue to rise, increasing the potential for school-readiness gaps at ever younger ages….
http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/inside-school-research/2014/01/is_kindergarten_the_new_first.html?intc=es

Here is the press release from the University of Virginia:

U.Va. Researchers Find that Kindergarten Is the New First Grade
January 29, 2014
Audrey Breen
Kindergarten classrooms nationwide have changed dramatically since the late 1990s and nearly all of these changes are in the direction of a heightened focus on academics, particularly literacy, according to researchers from EdPolicyWorks, the center on education policy and workforce competitiveness at the University of Virginia.
In a working paper titled “Is Kindergarten the New First Grade? The Changing Nature of Kindergarten in the Age of Accountability,” U.Va. researchers Daphna Bassok and Anna Rorem posit that increased emphasis on accountability led to meaningful changes in the kindergartener experience.
“In less than a decade we’ve seen the kindergarten experience essentially transformed,” said Bassok, assistant professor at the Curry School of Education. “Academic skill-building has really taken center stage in today’s kindergarten classrooms, in a way that just wasn’t the case” before the late 1990s.
The study by Bassok and Rorem, a policy associate at U.Va.’s Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service,, uses two large nationally representative datasets to track changes in kindergarten classrooms between 1998 and 2006. It shows that in 1998, 31 percent of kindergarten teachers indicated that most children should learn to read while in kindergarten. By 2006, 65 percent of teachers agreed with this statement. To accommodate this new reality, classroom time spent on literacy rose by 25 percent, from roughly 5.5 to seven hours per week.
Bassok said that, done correctly, this increased focus on academics could be helpful. “Young children are curious, enthusiastic learners, with immense potential. There are ways to teach early literacy and math content to young learners so that it’s engaging, fun and really helps them get a head start.”
But the increased emphasis on literacy may have a cost. As teachers spend more time and attention on academic content, time centered on play, exploration and social interactions may drop.
“It certainly doesn’t have to be an ‘either/or’ scenario, where academics crowd out everything else,” Bassok said, “but I worry that in practice, this is what is happening in many classrooms.”
Over the last decade, both media and research accounts have suggested that kindergarten classrooms were increasingly characterized by mounting homework demands, worksheets, pressure to learn to read as early as possible, and heightened levels of stress. Bassok’s and Rorem’s study is [db1] the first that provides nationally representative empirical evidence about the actual changes.
“We went into this project expecting to see some change over time,” Bassok said. “What was surprising to us was to see substantial changes in the kindergarten experience along essentially every dimension. And the magnitude of these changes was striking.”
The study focused on four dimensions: Teacher beliefs about school readiness and kindergarten learning, how teachers used their time during daily activities, what specific curricular content was covered and kindergarten teachers’ views about assessments.
Teachers’ expectations for their kindergarten students escalated rapidly. Between 1998 and 2006, the percentage of teachers who indicated that incoming kindergarteners need to know most of the letters or count to 20 doubled. Teachers also increasingly believe that children who begin formal reading and math instruction before kindergarten will do better in elementary school.
Over the time period analyzed in the study, teachers reported spending 25 percent more time on reading and language arts. Time spent on all other subjects decreased.
“We saw meaningful drops in time spent on physical education, art, music, science and social studies, which was really striking given that far more children now attend full-day kindergarten so, at least in theory, there should be more time available for all sorts of learning experiences,” Bassok said.
In fact, the data show that kindergarteners in 2006 spent as much time on reading and language arts as they did on mathematics, science, social studies, music and art combined. The number of kindergarten teachers who reported their students never have physical education also doubled over this period[P2] .
Physical activity and play are particularly important for kindergarten students, Rorem said.
“Playtime has been part of the kindergarten classroom since its beginnings,” Rorem said. “In fact, Freidrich Froebel, who helped make kindergarten popular in the United States, is said to have thought of play as ‘highly serious.’ Today, some research suggests that time for play and physical activity is beneficial for kids not only in its own right, but also as it helps them ’reset’ their attention spans.”
Bassok and Rorem reviewed teachers’ responses to 15 specific curricular elements of English language arts skills. The percentage of teachers reporting they taught a particular literacy skill every day went up for all 15 items considered.
Teachers were also asked specifically about language arts skills that in 1998 were considered “advanced” and taught in a later grade, such as composing and writing complete sentences, conventionally spelling and composing and writing stories with an understandable beginning, middle and end. By 2006, teaching each of these skills in kindergarten was much more commonplace. For example, in 1998, 45 percent of teachers said they never taught students “conventional spelling” because it was an advanced concept taught in later grades; this figure fell to 13 percent in the later period. The percentage who said they taught conventional spelling every day doubled from 18 percent to 36 percent.
The final dimension was how teachers’ views about assessment have changed over time. In the study, the researchers found that teachers who considered a child’s achievement relative to local, state or professional standards “very important” or “essential” rose from 57 percent to 76 percent.
Strikingly, kindergarten teachers in 2006 reported using standardized tests in their classrooms far more than even first-grade teachers did in the pre-accountability years. While a quarter of kindergarten teachers in 2006 reported using standardized tests at least once a month, in 1999, only 11 percent of first-grade teachers used these tests so often.
Kindergarten classrooms, at least traditionally, have included much broader goals beyond teaching reading and math skills, according to Bassok. Children were learning how to share and navigate friendships, how to cooperate but also how to be confident and self-sufficient.
“We know that these early social skills are important predictors of students’ learning trajectories,” Bassok said. “So our worry is that if done inappropriately, the focus on academics may have really pushed these other kind of learning opportunities aside.”
Bassok, who is currently studying the possible drivers for these shifts, believes that one key candidate is the introduction of No Child Left Behind, which was signed into law in 2002.
“Since the introduction of NCLB, there has been a greater focus on high-stakes assessments in literacy and math,” Bassok said. “There are many anecdotal accounts of a ‘trickling down’ of intense accountability pressures from the tested grades – beginning in grade three – down to lower elementary grades, including kindergarten and even preschool.”
Another likely factor, according to Bassok, is changes over this period in early childhood experiences before school entry.
“With our increased awareness of the importance of early childhood education, we have way more children attending preschool, and we have parents, particularly middle- and high-income families, investing in their young children’s early education in a way that likely wasn’t the case two decades ago. Children are exposed to academic content earlier than they used to be and, in part, kindergarten teachers may be responding to these changes.”
EdPolicyWorks is a joint collaboration between the Curry School of Education and the Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy that seeks to bring together researchers from across the University and the state to focus on important questions of educational policy and the competitiveness of labor in an era of globalization.
About the Author
Audrey Breen
Director of Communications
Curry School of Education
audreybreen@virginia.edu
434-924-0809
Media Contact:
Audrey Breen
Director of Communications
Curry School of Education
audreybreen@virginia.edu
434-924-0809

We must not so over-schedule children that they have no time to play and to dream.

‘Redshirting’ kindergarteners https://drwilda.com/tag/redshirting-holding-kids-back-from-kindergarten/

The state of preschool education is dire
https://drwilda.wordpress.com/2012/04/10/the-state-of-preschool-education-is-dire/

The ‘whole child’ approach to education
https://drwilda.wordpress.com/2012/02/10/the-whole-child-approach-to-education/

Where information leads to Hope. © Dr. Wilda.com

Dr. Wilda says this about that ©

Blogs by Dr. Wilda:

COMMENTS FROM AN OLD FART©
http://drwildaoldfart.wordpress.com/

Dr. Wilda Reviews ©
http://drwildareviews.wordpress.com/

Dr. Wilda ©
http://drwilda.com

Tags: Early Childhood Education, Early Learning, Is Kindergarten the New First Grade? Researchers Say Yes, Kindergarten, Preschool, The Changing Nature of Kindergarten in the Age of Accountability, University of Virginia, Why Preschool Shouldn't Be Like School

Comments 2 Comments
Categories Dr Wilda

University of Virginia study: Child-care ratings are often not connected to learning outcomes

19 Sep

Child-care and preschool apparently fall into the category of we know good child-care when we see the effect. The National Network for Child Care says in INGREDIENTS FOR QUALITY CHILD CARE:

ENVIRONMENT
A quality environment is well planned and invites children to learn and grow. Centers and family day care homes that had a “neat, clean, orderly physical setting, organized into activity areas and oriented to the child’s activity” were found to have good child development (Clarke-Stewart, 1987, p. 113). Most states require 36 square feet of room per child for indoor areas, while 100 square feet per child is recommended outside (Gotts, 1988). There should be enough materials and equipment available that are developmentally appropriate for children of different age levels. Activities planned by the caregivers must also be developmentally appropriate and allow for imaginative play. Play opportunities that enhance children’s social, emotional, physical, and cognitive development are another indicator of high quality programs (Bridgman, 1988). Children need to be given time to play and explore using concrete materials in order to enhance their natural curiosity and intellectual development.
http://www.nncc.org/Choose.Quality.Care/ingredients.html

A University of Virginia study finds that many rating systems don’t aid in finding quality child-care.

Christine A. Samuels reported in the Education Week article, Child-Care Rating Systems Earn Few Stars in Study: Tool said to fall short in predicting quality:

A new study on child-care rating systems appears to bolster concerns among some in the early-learning field that the ratings generated by those systems are only tenuously connected to learning outcomes.
The researchers, who were from several universities, found that children attending highly rated pre-K programs did not have significantly better results in math, prereading, language, and social skills when they finished the programs, compared with the children attending lower-rated programs.
The findings, published last month in the journal Science, could have implications for states as they work to tie their ratings to real-world outcomes.
Researchers were studying “quality rating and improvement systems.” As a result of federal Race to the Top Early Learning Challenge grants, funding from states, and foundation support, nearly every state has or is creating such a system, known by the shorthand QRIS. About 13,000 child-care programs in 20 states have been rated through a QRIS. Most of the systems use symbols such as stars to represent levels of quality. But those systems draw in so many elements that a center’s rank may end up with a distant connection to teacher-child interactions, which are known to be a strong predictor of how well children do in preschool and afterward, said Terri J. Sabol, a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern University and the study’s lead author.
“My biggest take-away is that states need to simplify their rating systems,” Ms. Sabol said in an interview. “There’s something really appealing about having these five-star systems, but that comes at a cost because those stars don’t mean a lot for child outcomes.”
Gladys Wilson, the president and CEO of Qualistar Colorado, an organization that rates child-care centers in that state, said the rating system has had the benefit of providing a clear path to continuous improvement for care providers. The “improvement” aspect of a QRIS is as important as the ratings themselves, she said.
http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2013/09/11/03qris.h33.html?tkn=QZLFll1p9rMj4VpPniesUSGJQda2jpD5ew2V&cmp=clp-edweek

Citation:

Can Rating Pre-K Programs Predict Children’s Learning?
1. T. J. Sabol1,*,
2. S. L. Soliday Hong2,
3. R. C. Pianta3,
4. M. R. Burchinal2
+ Author Affiliations
1. 1Institute for Policy Research, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL 60208, USA.
2. 2Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC 27599, USA.
3. 3Center for the Advanced Study of Teaching and Learning, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA 22904, USA.
1. ↵*Corresponding author: terri.sabol@northwestern.edu
Summary
Early childhood education programs [e.g., prekindergarten (pre-K)]—characterized by stimulating and supportive teacher-child interactions in enriched classroom settings—promote children’s learning and school readiness (1–3). But in the United States, most children, particularly those from low-income backgrounds, attend programs that may not be of sufficient quality to improve readiness for school success (4). States are adopting Quality Rating and Improvement Systems (QRISs) as a market-based approach for improving early education, but few states have evaluated the extent to which their QRIS relates to child outcomes. We studied the ability of several QRISs to distinguish among meaningful differences in quality that support learning.

See, Child-Care Quality Rating and Improvement Systems in Five States http://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/monographs/2008/RAND_MG795.pdf

Here is the press release from the University of Virginia:

States’ Methods for Rating Preschool Quality Fail to Predict Children’s Readiness for Kindergarten
Published on 08/22/13, in News [1] » Press Releases [2]
Website Addresses Used in the Document
1. http://curry.virginia.edu/news
2. http://curry.virginia.edu/press-releases
3. http://www.sciencemag.org/content/341/6148/845.summary
CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va., Aug. 22, 2013 — According to findings published today in the journal Science [3], publicly funded pre-kindergarten classrooms that received the highest marks in quality rating systems used by the majority of states are no better at fostering children’s school readiness than classrooms with lower ratings.
However, researchers at the University of Virginia, Northwestern University and the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill isolated one factor of the many used in the rating systems that did make a difference in school readiness: the quality of teacher-student interactions.
Preschool ClassEven before President Obama promised to work with states to “make high-quality preschool available to every child in America” during his February 2013 State of the Union Address, national debate was taking place to accurately define “high-quality preschool.”
“A primary purpose of preschool is to advance children’s learning and development in preparation for kindergarten; this is especially true for disadvantaged children who are mostly served by publicly funded programs,” said Robert Pianta, dean of the Curry School of Education at the University of Virginia and founding director of U.Va.’s Center for Advanced Study of Teaching and Learning. “Yet these findings demonstrate that current program quality evaluation models don’t predict the very thing that public pre-K programs are being designed and funded to produce.”
The paper, “Can Policy-Relevant Ratings of Pre-K Programs Predict Children’s Learning?” is co-written by Pianta; Terri J. Sabol, postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern; Sandra L. Soliday Hong, postdoctoral fellow at the University of North Carolina; and Margaret R. Burchinal, senior scientist at the University of North Carolina.
These researchers used data from two studies of nearly 3,000 children in 703 state-funded pre-kindergarten classrooms from nine states, representing a variety of pre-kindergarten models in use across the United States. Using this data set, investigators calculated the extent to which various features of program quality included in each of nine different states’ Quality Rating and Improvement Systems, or QRIS, actually predicted children’s readiness for kindergarten at the end of their year in pre-K.
A Quality Rating and Improvement System is a method for collecting and compiling information on program features presumed to measure program quality. Higher ratings should equal higher quality. To the extent that enrollment in high-quality pre-K programs is a means of fostering children’s success in school, then children attending higher-rated programs should perform better on measures of kindergarten readiness. To determine readiness, children’s learning and development were evaluated by assessing gains in academic skills, language skills, social skills and problem behaviors in the pre-kindergarten year.
The researchers selected the five most commonly used measures of quality used in multiple states’ QRIS: staff qualifications, physical environment, class size,teacher-child ratio and qualities of interactions between teachers and children. They combined these indicators to calculate overall quality ratings using formulas from the QRIS systems used in nine states.
Results demonstrated that whether a child was enrolled in a highly rated program was unrelated to their gains in learning during pre-K or their readiness to begin kindergarten.
While the aggregate ratings, with many measures, didn’t predict children’s learning, the researchers were able to pinpoint a single measure that would identify quality pre-K classrooms and consequently, which students would learn more.
“Children who were in classrooms with higher ratings based on observed interactions between teachers and students were more prepared for kindergarten,” Sabol said.
This study suggests that states ought to make changes in the ways they rate the quality of pre-K programs. Rating systems should focus on rating the quality of teacher-child interaction in order to assess and improve the components that matter most for children’s learning, Sabol said.
“Quality pre-K education can make a real difference for children,” Pianta said. “Yet when we measure program quality, we must focus on the features that actually make that difference for children. The major policy models being used for evaluation relate neither to children’s learning gains in the pre-K year nor to school readiness. Of all the features of preschool programs that can be measured, observations of teacher-child interactions may be most valuable.”
Website Addresses Used in the Document
1. http://curry.virginia.edu/news
2. http://curry.virginia.edu/press-releases
3. http://www.sciencemag.org/content/341/6148/845.summary

Your toddler not only needs food for their body and appropriate physical activity, but you need to nourish their mind and spirit as well.
There are several good articles which explain why you do not want your toddler parked in front of a television several hours each day. Robin Elise Weiss, LCCE has a very good explanation of how television can be used as a resource by distinguishing between television watching and targeting viewing of specific programs designed to enhance learning. In Should Babies and Toddlers Watch Television? Weiss comments about the effects of young children and television. MSNBC was reporting about toddlers and television in 2004. http://pregnancy.about.com/od/yourbaby/a/babiesandtv.htm

In the MSNBC report, Watching TV May Hurt Toddlers’ Attention Spans the following comments were made:

Researchers have found that every hour preschoolers watch television each day boosts their chances — by about 10 percent — of developing attention deficit problems later in life.
The findings back up previous research showing that television can shorten attention spans and support American Academy of Pediatrics recommendations that youngsters under age 2 not watch television.
“The truth is there are lots of reasons for children not to watch television. Other studies have shown it to be associated with obesity and aggressiveness” too, said lead author Dr. Dimitri Christakis, a researcher at Children’s Hospital and Regional Medical Center in Seattle.
The issue is whether prolonged television watching affects a child’s brain development. http://www.nbcnews.com/id/4664749

See, How to Have a Happier, Healthier, Smarter Baby http://health.usnews.com/health-news/family-health/childrens-health/articles/2010/10/19/how-to-have-a-happier-healthier-smarter-baby

Parents and caregivers must interact with their children and read to them. Television is not a parental substitute.

Where information leads to Hope. © Dr. Wilda.com

Dr. Wilda says this about that ©
Blogs by Dr. Wilda:

COMMENTS FROM AN OLD FART©
http://drwildaoldfart.wordpress.com/

Dr. Wilda Reviews ©
http://drwildareviews.wordpress.com/

Dr. Wilda ©
https://drwilda.com/

Tags: Can Rating Pre-K Programs Predict Children's Learning?, child care, Child-Care Quality Rating and Improvement Systems in Five States, Child-Care Rating Systems Earn Few Stars in Study Tool said to fall short in predicting quality, education, How to Have a Happier Healthier, Preschool, QUALITY CHILD CARE, Smarter Baby, The National Network for Child Care, University of Virginia, Watching TV May Hurt Toddlers’ Attention Spans

Comments Leave a Comment
Categories Dr Wilda

Rutgers study: Underfunding of preschool threatens at-risk children

29 Apr

Moi wrote in Policy brief: The fiscal and educational benefits of universal universal preschool:

In Early learning standards and the K-12 continuum, moi said:

Preschool is a portal to the continuum of life long learning. A good preschool stimulates the learning process and prompts the child into asking questions about their world and environment. Baby Center offers advice about how to find a good preschool and general advice to expectant parents. At the core of why education is important is the goal of equipping every child with the knowledge and skills to pursue THEIR dream, whatever that dream is. Christine Armario and Dorie Turner are reporting in the AP article, AP News Break: Nearly 1 in 4 Fails Military Exam which appeared in the Seattle Times:

Nearly one-fourth of the students who try to join the U.S. Army fail its entrance exam, painting a grim picture of an education system that produces graduates who can’t answer basic math, science and reading questions, according to a new study released Tuesday.

Many children begin their first day of school behind their more advantaged peers. Early childhood learning is an important tool is bridging the education deficit. https://drwilda.wordpress.com/2012/01/03/early-learning-standards-and-the-k-12-contiuum/

https://drwilda.com/2012/11/25/policy-brief-the-fiscal-and-educational-benefits-of-universal-universal-preschool/

Joy Resmovits reported in the Huffington Post article, Preschool Funding Reached ‘State Of Emergency’ In 2012: NIEER Report:

States are drastically underfunding programs for their youngest learners now more than ever, according to a report released Monday, even as researchers and policymakers increasingly point to pre-school as a ladder to the middle class.

Funding per student for state pre-school programs has reached its lowest point in a decade, according to “The State of Preschool 2012,” the annual yearbook released by Rutgers University’s National Institute for Early Education Research. “The 2011-2012 school year was the worst in a decade for progress in access to high-quality pre-K for America’s children,” the authors wrote. After a decade of increasing enrollment, that growth stalled, according to the report. Though the 2011-2012 school year marks the first time pre-K enrollment didn’t increase along with the rate of population change.

“The state of preschool was a state of emergency” in 2012, said Steve Barnett, NIEER’s director. Between the 2010-2011 and 2011-2012 school years, pre-K spending on state programs dropped by more than $548 million overall, and $442 per student (to $3,841) when adjusted for inflation, according to the report.

This means state pre-K funding per child has fallen more than $1,100 in real dollars from 2001-2002. “That’s the lowest since we’ve been tracking pre-K,” Barnett said. He called the cuts “severe” and “unprecedented.” This is the first time NIEER has seen average, per-student spending slip below $4,000. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/29/preschool-funding-2012-nieer-yearbook_n_3175249.html?utm_hp_ref=@education123

Here is the press release from The National Institute for Early Education Research:

Study Finds Drastic State Pre-K Funding Cuts Put Nation’s Youngest Learners at Risk

Monday, April 29, 2013

Funding Per Child Has Fallen More Than $1,000 Over the Decade; Programs Lose Quality as Financial Support Declines

CONTACT: Jen Fitzgerald, (848) 932-3138, jfitzgerald@nieer.org

Washington, D.C. — State funding for pre-K decreased by over half a billion dollars in 2011-2012, the largest one-year drop ever, says a new study from the National Institute for Early Education Research (NIEER) which has tracked state pre-K since 2002.

The State of Preschool 2012 yearbook cited two other “firsts”: After a decade of growth, enrollment in state pre-K has stalled. And despite stagnant enrollment, state funding per child fell to $3,841 — well below the $5,020 (inflation-adjusted) national average in 2001-2002.

“Even though the nation is emerging from the Great Recession, it is clear that the nation’s youngest learners are still bearing the brunt of the budget cuts,” said NIEER Director Steve Barnett. Reductions were widespread with 27 of 40 states with pre-K programs reporting funding per child declined in 2011-2012.

The adverse consequences of declining funding were manifested in a retrenchment in program quality as well. Seven programs lost ground against benchmarks for quality standards while only three gained. Only 15 states plus the District of Columbia provided enough funding per-child to meet all 10 benchmarks for quality standards. And, only 20 percent of all children enrolled in state-funded pre-K attend those programs. More than half a million children, or 42 percent of nationwide enrollment, were served by programs that met fewer than half of NIEER’s quality standards benchmarks.

Education in the years before kindergarten plays an important role in preparing our youngest citizens for productive lives in the global economy. Yet, our nation’s public investment in their future through pre-K declined during the recent economic downturn at the very time that parents’ financial capacity to invest in their children was hardest hit. America will pay the price of that lapse for decades to come. Barnett also noted that “while the recession greatly exacerbated the decline in funding, there was already a general trend in the states toward declining funding for quality.” In this respect, President Obama’s new universal pre-K proposal is especially timely. “We have studied the President’s plan and find it provides states with strong incentives to raise quality while expanding access to pre-K. The plan will assist states already leading the way, states that lost ground during the recession, and the 10 states that still have no state-funded pre-K,” he said.

###

The National Institute for Early Education Research (www.nieer.org) at the Graduate School of Education, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, supports early childhood education policy and practice through independent, objective research.

The State of Preschool 2012: State Preschool Yearbook

View the full report

One of the major contributors to poverty in third world nations is limited access to education opportunities. Without continued sustained investment in education in this country, we are the next third world country.

What is the Educare preschool model? https://drwilda.com/2012/11/09/what-is-the-educare-preschool-model/

The state of preschool education is dire https://drwilda.wordpress.com/2012/04/10/the-state-of-preschool-education-is-dire/

Oregon State University study: Ability to pay attention in preschool may predict college success https://drwilda.com/2012/08/08/oregon-state-university-study-ability-to-pay-attention-in-preschool-may-predict-college-success/

Pre-kindergarten programs help at-risk students prepare for schoolhttps://drwilda.wordpress.com/2012/07/16/pre-kindergarten-programs-help-at-risk-students-prepare-for-school/

Where information leads to Hope. © Dr. Wilda.com

Dr. Wilda says this about that ©

Blogs by Dr. Wilda:

COMMENTS FROM AN OLD FART© http://drwildaoldfart.wordpress.com/

Dr. Wilda Reviews © http://drwildareviews.wordpress.com/

Dr. Wilda © https://drwilda.com/

Tags: Early Learning, education, Education and Poverty, national institute for early education research, politics, Preschool, Preschool Funding, Preschool Funding Reached 'State Of Emergency' In 2012 NIEER Report, research, Rutgers University, science, State of Preschool 2012, Study Finds Drastic State Pre-K Funding Cuts Put Nation's Youngest Learners at Risk, The National Institute for Early Education Research

Comments 2 Comments
Categories Dr Wilda

What is the Educare preschool model?

9 Nov

In Early learning standards and the K-12 continuum, moi said:

Nearly one-fourth of the students who try to join the U.S. Army fail its entrance exam, painting a grim picture of an education system that produces graduates who can’t answer basic math, science and reading questions, according to a new study released Tuesday.

Julie Rasicot is reporting in the Education Week article, Public-private model generates interest:

Here at Educare, a $16 million early-childhood school that opened in July with the goal of closing the achievement gap for local children living in poverty, building that sense of security and familiarity is a major component of the program. These infants will spend three years with the same teachers. At age 3, they’ll move to a new teacher who will stay with them for two more years.

Funded by Head Start and public and private partnerships, this school is the newest addition to the growing Educare Learning Network’s 17 schools in communities across the country, a program that its proponents hope will become a national model for comprehensive early-childhood education. Since 2000, the Chicago-based nonprofit has been combining public and private money to provide early intervention for children deemed educationally and socially at risk and to help build strong bonds between the children, their parents, and teachers. The goal is to ensure that the children start school ready to learn, on par with peers from more-advantaged families.

Research has long shown that children from disadvantaged backgrounds enter kindergarten far behind their more-advantaged peers, and often face continued hardship in achieving success in school and life.

Continuity of Care

That’s why Educare promotes a comprehensive approach to high-quality child care and early learning through the critical years from birth to age 5, according to top officials. In the District of Columbia, in fact, the program anchors the city’s Promise Neighborhoods initiative, an effort to provide a web of social services to disadvantaged children and their families, much as the Harlem Children’s Zone does in New York.

The Educare program stresses the importance of continuity of care—keeping children together with the same teachers from birth to age 3—and strong parent engagement.

“Our major strategy is to promote the centrality of relationships as the cornerstone of learning for all human beings,” said Portia Kennel, the founder and executive director of the Educare Learning Network. “All learning happens in the context of relationships with caring adults.”

Low teacher-to-student ratios—three teachers serve a maximum of eight infants or toddlers— and a requirement that all teachers have a least a bachelor’s degree contribute to a high-quality experience, officials said.

Katherine Stimpson, a teacher in the pre-toddler classroom at Educare, reads a book with Xavier Monk. As part of the program, children stay with the same teacher from birth to age 3 and then move to another teacher for two more years.

—Lexey Swall for Education Week

It’s a model that’s achieving results, according to recent research. A study released in August by the FPG Child Development Institute at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill found that Educare was succeeding at preparing at-risk children for later achievement.

The institute has been conducting an implementation study of the Educare model since 2005. Now including 12 Educare schools serving about 1,800 children, study data show that “more years of Educare attendance are associated with better school readiness and vocabulary skills.” http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2012/11/07/11educare_ep.h32.html?tkn=URZFuw%2B819xZwM89pQJqzDJJ78tZ15sQZaTQ&cmp=clp-edweek

This is what Educare says at its site:

about educare > What is Educare

What is Educare?

Educare is a research-based Program that prepares, at-risk children for school.

Through a growing coast-to-coast network of state-of-the-art, full-day, year-round schools, funded mostly by existing public dollars, Educare serves at-risk children from birth to 5 years. Each Educare School embraces a community’s most vulnerable children with programming and instructional support that develop early skills and nurture the strong parent-child relationships that create the foundation for successful learning.

Educare is a:

Program based on the best of early education practices that ensure the school readiness of children most at risk for academic failure

Place of early learning that sends a clear message that we must invest in early childhood education because children are born learning

Partnership comprised of philanthropists, Head Start and Early Head Start providers, and school officials dedicated to narrowing the achievement gap for children in their communities

Platform for raising awareness of the value and vital importance of learning during a child’s first five years of life.

Narrowing the Achievement Gap

Research shows that children who experience Educare for a full five years arrive at school performing on par with average kindergarteners, regardless of their socio-economic standing. Educare children have more extensive vocabularies and are better able to recognize letters, numbers and colors than their peers.

Children who attend an Educare School also develop strong social skills, including self-confidence, persistence and methods to manage frustration. All of these abilities are strong predictors for later success in academics and in life. What’s more, early findings indicate the gains Educare children make hold as they move through elementary school. http://www.educareschools.org/home/index.php

Here is the research regarding the Educare model:

We know from a large body of research that good quality classroom environments are associated with enhanced child outcomes in the areas of language, vocabulary, early math and social skills.

Since 2005, nationally renowned researchers from the FPG Child Development Institute at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill have tracked program quality and child and family outcomes at Educare Schools. And results from four years of study are promising. The study shows that low-income children, including children with limited proficiency in English, who started in an Educare School as babies, enter kindergarten with achievement levels close to their middle-income peers and much higher than would be expected of children in poverty.

The FPG Child Development Institute, founded in 1966 as The Frank Porter Graham Center, is one of the nation’s largest centers studying young children and their families. Among its many achievements is the Abecedarian Project, a longitudinal study of preschoolers frequently cited by experts and policymakers in making the case that quality early childhood education can narrow the achievement gap. FPG researchers also developed the measurement tools now used nationally and internationally to evaluate the quality of programs, including Educare Schools.

Related publications:

Demonstrating Results: Educare Implementation Study Data http://www.educareschools.org/results/index.php

The state of preschool education is dire https://drwilda.wordpress.com/2012/04/10/the-state-of-preschool-education-is-dire/

Oregon State University study: Ability to pay attention in preschool may predict college success https://drwilda.com/2012/08/08/oregon-state-university-study-ability-to-pay-attention-in-preschool-may-predict-college-success/

Pre-kindergarten programs help at-risk students prepare for school https://drwilda.wordpress.com/2012/07/16/pre-kindergarten-programs-help-at-risk-students-prepare-for-school/

Dr. Wilda says this about that ©

Blogs by Dr. Wilda:

COMMENTS FROM AN OLD FART © http://drwildaoldfart.wordpress.com/

Dr. Wilda Reviews © http://drwildareviews.wordpress.com/

Dr. Wilda © https://drwilda.com/

Tags: At-risk Children, Baby Center, Early Learning Education, Early Learning Standards, Educare, education, Headstart, Low-incomw, politics, Preschool, Public-private model generates interest:, research

Comments 5 Comments
Categories Dr Wilda

OECD study: U.S. lags behind in preschool enrollment

11 Sep

Moi discussed preschool education in The state of preschool education is dire:

Nearly one-fourth of the students who try to join the U.S. Army fail its entrance exam, painting a grim picture of an education system that produces graduates who can’t answer basic math, science and reading questions, according to a new study released Tuesday.

Many children begin their first day of school behind their more advantaged peers. Early childhood learning is an important tool is bridging the education deficit. https://drwilda.com/2012/04/10/the-state-of-preschool-education-is-dire/

Lesli A. Maxwell reports in the Education Week article, Study Finds U.S. Trailing in Preschool Enrollment a new study by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD):

According to the Paris-based OECD’s “Education at a Glance 2012,” a report released today, the United States ranks 28th out of 38 countries for the share of 4-year-olds enrolled in pre-primary education programs, at 69 percent. That’s compared with more than 95 percent enrollment rates in France, the Netherlands, Spain, and Mexico, which lead the world in early-childhood participation rates for 4-year-olds. Ireland, Poland, Finland, and Brazil are among the nations that trail the United States.

The United States also invests significantly less public money in early-childhood programs than its counterparts in the Group of Twenty, or G-20, economies, which include 19 countries and the European Union. On average, across the countries that are compared in the OECD report, 84 percent of early-childhood students were enrolled in public programs or in private settings that receive major government resources in 2010. In this country, just 55 percent of early-childhood students were enrolled in publicly supported programs in 2010, while 45 percent attended independent private programs.

“The United States is still pretty far behind much of the rest of the industrialized world,” in terms of publicly supported early-childhood opportunities, Andreas Schleicher, OECD’s deputy director for education and the special advisor on education policy to the secretary-general of the OECD, said in a briefing. http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2012/09/11/04oecd.h32.html?tkn=YZXFRtH3UunPt9e%2B5ZodvlLULKTdt47aFyK8&cmp=clp-edweek

Here are the key findings from the OECD study:

KEY FINDINGS

Equity

Young women are five percentage points more likely than young men to become better educated than their parents (40% compared with 35%), while young men are more likely than young women to have lower educational attainment than their parents (15% compared with 11%).

The educational attainment of mothers has a stronger impact on students’ reading performance than the primary language at home or the proportion of immigrant students in a school.

Across OECD countries, more than one-third of immigrant students attend schools with the highest concentrations of students with low-educated mothers. In the European Union, more than half do.

Education spending

On average, OECD countries spend USD 9 252 annually per student from primary through tertiary education: USD 7 719 per primary student, USD 9 312 per secondary student and USD 13 728 per tertiary student.

The share of private funding for tertiary education increased between 2000 and 2009 in 18 out of 25 countries. The share increased by 5 percentage points on average, and by more than 12 percentage points in the Slovak Republic (from 8.8% to 30%) and the United Kingdom (from 32.3% to 70.4%).

An increasing number of OECD countries are charging higher tuition fees for international students than for national students, and many also differentiate tuition fees by field of education, largely because of the difference in the public cost of studies.

Between 2000 and 2009, in 24 of the 29 countries for which data are available, expenditure per primary, secondary and post-secondary non-tertiary student increased spending by at least 16%. The increase exceeded 50% in Brazil, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Ireland, Korea, Poland, the Slovak Republic and the United Kingdom. By contrast, in France, Israel and Italy, this expenditure increased by only 10% or less between 2000 and 2009.

School environment

Salaries for teachers with at least 15 years of experience average USD 35 630 at the pre-primary level, USD 37 603 at the primary level, USD 39 401 at the lower secondary level and USD 41 182 at the upper secondary level.

Teachers’ salaries increased in real terms in most countries between 2000 and 2010. In Denmark, Estonia, Ireland, Portugal and Scotland, salaries increased by at least 20%. In the Czech Republic (primary and lower secondary levels) and in Turkey, salaries doubled over the past decade. Only in France and Japan did teachers’ salaries decrease in real terms, by more than 5%.

The number of teaching hours per teacher in public schools in 2010 averages 782 hours per year in primary education, 704 hours in lower secondary education, and 658 hours in upper secondary education. This is little changed from 2000 but has changed dramatically in a few countries. It increased by more than 25% in the Czech Republic at the primary level and in Portugal and Spain at the secondary level.

Some two-thirds of teachers and academic staff are women on average in the OECD, but the proportion of female teachers decreases as the level of education increases: ranging from 97% at pre-primary to 41% at tertiary level.

58% of primary teachers are at least 40 years old on average in OECD countries. The proportion exceeds 70% in the Czech Republic, Germany, Italy and Sweden. At secondary level, 63% of teachers are at least 40, and 70% or more in Austria, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Germany and Italy. http://www.oecd.org/newsroom/educationspendingrisingbutaccesstohighereducationremainsunequalinmostcountriessaysoecd.htm

http://www.oecd.org/newsroom/educationspendingrisingbutaccesstohighereducationremainsunequalinmostcountriessaysoecd.htm

Citation:

Education at a Glance 2012: OECD Indicators

‌ Download PDF

Published: 11 Sept 2012

No. pags: 570

Education at a Glance 2012: OECD Indicators

The 2012 edition of Education at a Glance enables countries to see themselves in the light of other countries’ educational performance.

Highlights

Chapter A

The output of educational institutions and the impact of learning

Indicators on educational attainment and graduation, gender and equity, and the economic, labour market and social outcomes of education

Chapter B

Financial and human resources invested in education

Indicators on national and per-student spending on education, higher education costs and support, and how resources are spent

Chapter C

Access to education, participation and progression

Indicators on access to education, early childhood education, international students, transitions from school to work, and adult learning

Chapter D

The learning environment and organisation of schools

Indicators on teachers, teacher salaries, teaching time, class size, school decision-making, and examinations

Additional Material

Highlights; Corrigendum; Coding of Missing Data; Annexes; Glossary; Education Database

http://www.oecd.org/edu/eag2012.htm#press

Our goals should be: A healthy child in a healthy family who attends a healthy school in a healthy neighborhood. ©

Think small, Not small minded ©

Money spent on early childhood programs is akin to yeast for bread. The whole society will rise.

Resources:

Why Preschool Matters?

Why Preschool is Important?

The Benefits of Preschool

Will Preschool Education Make a Child Ready for Kindergarten

Preschool, Why it is the Most Important Grade

National Conference of State Legislatures Resources on Kindergarten

Education Commission of the States, Full Day Kindergarten: A Study of State Policies in the United States

Tags: Education at a Glance 2012, OECD, Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, Preschool, Study Finds U.S. Trailing in Preschool Enrollment

Comments 2 Comments
Categories Dr Wilda

Oregon State University study: Ability to pay attention in preschool may predict college success

8 Aug

In Early learning standards and the K-12 continuum, moi said:

Nearly one-fourth of the students who try to join the U.S. Army fail its entrance exam, painting a grim picture of an education system that produces graduates who can’t answer basic math, science and reading questions, according to a new study released Tuesday.

Julie Rasicot summarizes the results of an Oregon State University study in the Education Week article, Ability to Pay Attention May Predict College Success, Study Says:

The researchers discovered that “children who were rated higher by their parents on attention span and persistence at age 4 had nearly 50 percent greater odds of getting a bachelor’s degree by age 25,” a university news release said.

“Our study shows that the biggest predictor of college completion wasn’t math or reading skills, but whether or not” kids were “able to pay attention and finish tasks at age 4,” early child development researcher and lead study author Megan McClelland said in the release.

The researchers stress that the good news is that these behavioral skills can be taught, so parents have another way to help their kids be successful in school. http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/early_years/2012/08/could_learning_how_to_pay.html?intc=es

Here is the press release from the Oregon State study, Preschool children who can pay attention more likely to finish college:

Preschool children who can pay attention more likely to finish college 8-6-12

CORVALLIS, Ore. – Young children who are able to pay attention and persist with a task have a 50 percent greater chance of completing college, according to a new study at Oregon State University.

Tracking a group of 430 preschool-age children, the study gives compelling evidence that social and behavioral skills, such as paying attention, following directions and completing a task may be even more crucial than academic abilities.

And the good news for parents and educators, the researchers said, is that attention and persistence skills are malleable and can be taught.

The results were just published online in Early Childhood Research Quarterly.

“There is a big push now to teach children early academic skills at the preschool level,” said Megan McClelland, an OSU early child development researcher and lead author of the study. “Our study shows that the biggest predictor of college completion wasn’t math or reading skills, but whether or not they were able to pay attention and finish tasks at age 4.”

Parents of preschool children were asked to rate their children on items such as “plays with a single toy for long periods of time” or “child gives up easily when difficulties are encountered.” Reading and math skills were assessed at age 7 using standardized assessments. At age 21, the same group was tested again for reading and math skills.

Surprisingly, achievement in reading and math did not significantly predict whether or not the students completed college. Instead, researchers found that children who were rated higher by their parents on attention span and persistence at age 4 had nearly 50 percent greater odds of getting a bachelor’s degree by age 25.

McClelland, who is a nationally-recognized expert in child development, said college completion has been shown in numerous studies to lead to higher wages and better job stability. She said the earlier that educators and parents can intervene, the more likely a child can succeed academically.

“We didn’t look at how well they did in college or at grade point average,” McClelland said. “The important factor was being able to focus and persist. Someone can be brilliant, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they can focus when they need to and finish a task or job.”

McClelland, who is also a core director in OSU’s Hallie E. Ford Center for Healthy Children and Families, said interventions aimed at increasing young children’s self-control abilities have repeatedly shown to help boost “self-regulation,” or a child’s ability to listen, pay attention, follow through on a task and remember instructions.

In a past study, McClelland found that simple, active classroom games such as Simon Says and Red Light/Green Light have been effective tools for increasing both literacy and self-regulation skills.

“Academic ability carries you a long way, but these other skills are also important,” McClelland said. “Increasingly, we see that the ability to listen, pay attention, and complete important tasks is crucial for success later in life.”

OSU’s Alan Acock, along with Andrea Piccinin of the University of Victoria and Sally Ann Rhea and Michael Stallings of the University of Colorado, contributed to this study, which was funded by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and a Colorado Adoption Project grant.

About the OSU College of Public Health and Human Sciences: The College creates connections in teaching, research and community outreach while advancing knowledge, policies and practices that improve population health in communities across Oregon and beyond.

Jonathan Cohn’s study about the value of early learning is described in Jonathan Cohn’s ‘The Two Year Window’:

Jonathan Cohn reports about an unprecedented experiment which occurred in Romanian orphanages in the New Republic article, The Two Year Window. There are very few experiments involving humans because of ethical considerations.

Nelson had traveled to Romania to take part in a cutting-edge experiment. It was ten years after the fall of the Communist dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu, whose scheme for increasing the country’s population through bans on birth control and abortion had filled state-run institutions with children their parents couldn’t support. Images from the orphanages had prompted an outpouring of international aid and a rush from parents around the world to adopt the children. But ten years later, the new government remained convinced that the institutions were a good idea—and was still warehousing at least 60,000 kids, some of them born after the old regime’s fall, in facilities where many received almost no meaningful human interaction. With backing from the MacArthur Foundation, and help from a sympathetic Romanian official, Nelson and colleagues from Harvard, Tulane, and the University of Maryland prevailed upon the government to allow them to remove some of the children from the orphanages and place them with foster families. Then, the researchers would observe how they fared over time in comparison with the children still in the orphanages. They would also track a third set of children, who were with their original parents, as a control group.

In the field of child development, this study—now known as the Bucharest Early Intervention Project—was nearly unprecedented. Most such research is performed on animals, because it would be unethical to expose human subjects to neglect or abuse. But here the investigators were taking a group of children out of danger. The orphanages, moreover, provided a sufficiently large sample of kids, all from the same place and all raised in the same miserable conditions. The only variable would be the removal from the institutions, allowing researchers to isolate the effects of neglect on the brain….

Drury, Nelson, and their collaborators are still learning about the orphans. But one upshot of their work is already clear. Childhood adversity can damage the brain as surely as inhaling toxic substances or absorbing a blow to the head can. And after the age of two, much of that damage can be difficult to repair, even for children who go on to receive the nurturing they were denied in their early years. This is a revelation with profound implication—and not just for the Romanian orphans.

APPROXIMATELY SEVEN MILLION American infants, toddlers, and preschoolers get care from somebody other than a relative, whether through organized day care centers or more informal arrangements, according to the Census Bureau. And much of that care is not very good. One widely cited study of child care in four states, by researchers in Colorado, found that only 8 percent of infant care centers were of “good” or “excellent” quality, while 40 percent were “poor.” The National Institute of Child Health and Human Development has found that three in four infant caregivers provide only minimal cognitive and language stimulation—and that more than half of young children in non-maternal care receive “only some” or “hardly any” positive caregiving. http://www.tnr.com/article/economy/magazine/97268/the-two-year-window?page=0,0&passthru=YzBlNDJmMmRkZTliNDgwZDY4MDhhYmIwMjYyYzhlMjg

Because the ranks of poor children are growing in the U.S., this study portends some grave challenges not only for particular children, but this society and this country. Adequate early learning opportunities and adequate early parenting is essential for proper development in children. https://drwilda.wordpress.com/2011/12/18/jonathan-cohns-the-two-year-window/

The state of preschool education is dire https://drwilda.wordpress.com/2012/04/10/the-state-of-preschool-education-is-dire/

Pre-kindergarten programs help at-risk students prepare for school https://drwilda.wordpress.com/2012/07/16/pre-kindergarten-programs-help-at-risk-students-prepare-for-school/

Tags: Ability to Pay Attention May Predict College Success Study Says, Attention Span, Early Learning, Preschool, Preschool children who can pay attention more likely to finish college, The Two Year Window.

Comments 7 Comments
Categories Dr Wilda

Pre-kindergarten programs help at-risk students prepare for school

16 Jul

In Early learning standards and the K-12 continuum, moi said:

Nearly one-fourth of the students who try to join the U.S. Army fail its entrance exam, painting a grim picture of an education system that produces graduates who can’t answer basic math, science and reading questions, according to a new study released Tuesday.

Many children begin their first day of school behind their more advantaged peers. Early childhood learning is an important tool is bridging the education deficit.

eSchool News.Com reports that the Pre-K Coalition, which includes the American Association of School Administrators, American Federation of Teachers, Council of Chief State School Officers, National Association of Elementary School Principals, National Association of State Boards of Education, National Education Association, and the National School Boards Association has released the report, “The Importance of Aligning Pre-K through 3rd Grade.”

Gains made in high-quality preschool programs must be sustained and built upon throughout the K-3 years, according to the report. Robust P-3 initiatives align comprehensive early learning standards with state K-3 content standards in an effort to promote children’s healthy development, social and emotional skills, and learning. Those standards should be connected and build upon one another so that pre-kindergarten, kindergarten, and primary grade educators can develop and select effective curricula, teaching strategies, and assessment systems. Teaching teams should engage in joint professional development….
The Common Core State Standards hold promise in helping schools connect early learning to later grades, but many state K-12 systems might not connect to early childhood education systems within the same state….
http://www.eschoolnews.com/2011/12/22/report-sets-forth-early-learning-recommendations/

Our goals should be: A healthy child in a healthy family who attends a healthy school in a healthy neighborhood. ©

Think small, Not small minded ©

Money spent on early childhood programs is akin to yeast for bread. The whole society will rise.

Nancy Cambria writes in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch article, School camps in St. Louis area aim to give incoming kindergartners a leg up. The St. Louis programs are typical of many pre-kindergarten programs which are aimed at giving at-risk children a running start.

Some in the child development field worry that the programs are indicative of a national push by too many school districts to regiment young children into rigid, performance-based academic learning too early.

“I don’t have a problem that children have a four-week introduction to going to school in the summer, but you don’t want them to burn out and get them turned-off to school,” warned Joan Almon, director of programs for the Alliance for Children at the University of Maryland.

Administrators and teachers at Hazelwood said the monthlong program that ended last week gives children a chance to test the waters of a more structured school environment so they have less anxiety and more academic and social confidence in the coming school year.

Most of the classrooms are led by district kindergarten teachers, which, at bare minimum, gives the students the chance to know familiar faces when the school year starts in August, said Shanon Drennan, the coordinator for Sunny Start at Garrett Elementary.

For teachers, such programs get more children up to speed earlier on the basic routines and early reading and writing skills needed for an intensive learning year ahead. That makes things easier from the start for teachers who must achieve a lot of goals with their students in just nine months, Drennan said.

Mary Carver said her daughter, Annabell Wallsmith, loves Sunny Start.

“It gets my kid motivated to jump into kindergarten,” she said. “She’s learning the social skills, and it gets her more ready to read.”

TOO MUCH STRUCTURE?

But Almon worries that the motivation behind kindergarten summer school in some districts is to prepare students earlier for mandatory assessment testing and to move them away from the free play and exploration that research suggests enhances learning in young children.

“I just think that when we get caught in thinking the most regimented approach will be the best way, I haven’t seen them bring about a love of learning or a comfort with a group situation or an excitement about learning,” she said.

In the most extreme example she’s seen, Almon said, one North Carolina school district openly praised a teacher in their kindergarten summer “boot camp” program who wore military fatigues as she shouted lessons in ABCs and 1-2-3s….

Almon said the push she has seen toward rigid academics is particularly common in lower-income school districts where the stakes for funding and accreditation are high. She cites one study that found kindergartners in New York and Los Angeles public schools spent two to three hours a day in chairs working on literacy, math and testing and allowed about 20 minutes of play time.

At St. Louis Public Schools, Cheryl Davenport, the director of early childhood programs, said the district’s free “Kindergarten Here I Come!” program focuses heavily on play, though academic enrichment is a clear goal for their students.

The program, which has been running for more than a decade, enrolled about 400 children this summer. Although it’s open to all St. Louis children about to enter kindergarten, Davenport said the bulk of the program’s students are recommended by district preschool teachers who identify them as perhaps needing “a little bit of extra time and focus on basic skills such as early reading and early writing.”

But, she stressed, the program is geared toward fun. So math and lessons are typically given outside at the water table with measuring cups. Prereading and science come through cooking and art projects.

“Our program is meant to provide additional enrichment time,” she said. http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/education/school-camps-in-st-louis-area-aim-to-give-incoming/article_3dc0b0b4-9063-5755-9261-90cf94269b23.html#ixzz20cfmYtC6

The state of preschool education is dire https://drwilda.wordpress.com/2012/04/10/the-state-of-preschool-education-is-dire/

Seattle Research Institute study about outside play https://drwilda.wordpress.com/2012/04/15/seattle-research-institute-study-about-outside-play/

College Board’s ‘Big Future’: Helping low-income kids apply to college https://drwilda.wordpress.com/2012/04/19/college-boards-big-future-helping-low-income-kids-apply-to-college/

Tags: AP News Break: Nearly 1 in 4 Fails Military Exam, Babycenter, Early Learning Standards, K-12 continuum, Kindergarten, Preschool, School camps in St. Louis area aim to give incoming kindergartners a leg up, The Importance of Aligning Pre-K through 3rd Grade

Comments 7 Comments
Categories Dr Wilda

A no-brainer: Early childhood learning

14 Nov

Most parents no matter their class or ethnicity want to give their children a good start in life. A key building block to a solid education foundation is preschool. Changing family patterns make full day kindergarten an importation option. Adoption.Com provides a good overview of the history of full day kindergarten

CHANGES IN FAMILY PATTERNS

Among the changes that make full-day kindergarten attractive to many families are the following:

–An increase in the number of working parents. The number of mothers of children under six who work outside the home increased 34 percent from 1970 to 1980 (Evans and Marken 1983). In 1984, 48 percent of children under six had mothers in the labor force (The National Commission on Working Women 1985)

–An increase in the number of children with preschool or day care experience. Since the mid-1970s most children have had some kind of preschool experience in Head Start, day care, private preschools, or in early childhood programs in the public schools. These experiences have provided children’s first encounters with daily organized instructional and social activities before kindergarten (Herman 1984)

–An increase in the influence of television and family mobility. These two factors have produced 5-year-olds who seem more knowledgeable about their world and are apparently more ready for a full-day school experience than the children of previous generations

–Renewed interest in academic preparation for later school success. Even when both do not work outside the home, parents are interested in the contribution of early childhood programs (including full-day kindergarten) to later school success.

The article also discusses the pros and cons of full day kindergarten.

Valerie Strauss of the Washington Post reported on a recent conference about early learning in the article, Early childhood education again in spotlight:

Q.What does “high quality” mean when talking about early education programs?

W. Steven Barnett, co-director of the National Institute for Early Education Research at Rutgers University, said that quality programs for 3- and 4-year-olds develop skills and knowledge in language and literacy, math, science, social studies and the arts, while also addressing social, emotional and physical development. The Center for the Child Care Workforce says that such programs also have qualified and well-paid staff, low staff turnover, low student-teacher ratios, provision of comprehensive social services and nurturing environments, and periodic licensing and/or accreditation. The results of such programs, research shows, are students who succeed better academically, graduate from high school more often and are more economically productive later in life. Economic impact studies have shown that every $1 invested in early childhood education saves taxpayers up to $13 in future costs.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/early-childhood-education-again-in-spotlight/2011/10/06/gIQAwMNVYL_story.html

The goal should be to enroll as many children as possible in early learning programs.

A good summary of the benefits of all day kindergarten is provided by the Indiana Department of Education.

Teachers reported significantly greater progress for full-day children in literacy, math, general learning skills, and social skills. Full-day kindergarten children spend more time in teacher-directed individual work and learning centers. Elicker and Mathur (1997) found that full-day kindergarten allowed children to be more actively engaged and more positive in their activities.

Researchers find strong support for quality full-day kindergarten programs among parents and educators. Parents and educators report that full-day kindergarten is less rushed with opportunities for extending learning experiences, flexibility to address individual students’ needs and better communication between home and school (Elicker and Mathur, 1997; Hough and Bryde, 1996; Wichita Public Schools, 1989).

The full-day schedule allows more appropriate challenges for children at all developmental levels. For advanced students, there is time to complete increasingly challenging long-term projects. For children with developmental delays or those “at-risk” for school problems, there is more time for completion of projects and more time for teacher/student interaction.

Full-day kindergarten programs can result in social benefits. In a longitudinal study by J.R. Cryan (1992), children in full-day kindergarten programs showed more positive behavior than their peers in half-day kindergarten in the areas of originality, independent learning, involvement in classroom activities, productivity with their peers, and their approach to the teacher.

Full-day kindergarten programs can result in academic benefits. Research analyzing twenty-three studies of full-day kindergarten indicated that “overall, students who attend full-day kindergartens manifest significantly greater achievement than students who attend half-day kindergarten” (Child Study Journal, 27(4), 273). Full-day kindergarten children have fewer grade retentions and lower incidence of Title I placements (Cryan, 1992).

School corporations in Indiana that currently provide full-day kindergarten also find academic and social benefits. A longitudinal study of full-day kindergarten in the Evansville-Vanderburgh School Corporation revealed academic, social and behavioral benefits. On standardized tests, full-day kindergarten children performed significantly better than half-day kindergarten children in third, fifth, and seventh grade on the CTBS.

The number of transitions kindergartners face in a typical day can be reduced by full-day kindergarten. Due to family work schedules, children who attend half-day may be cared for by three or more care givers over the course of a day. While full-day kindergarten does not eliminate the need for child care outside of school (Elicker and Mathur, 1997), many parents, who are given the option, prefer full-day because children may have fewer transitions.

Two-way transportation can be an important benefit of full-day kindergarten. Currently, most school corporations in Indiana only provide one-way transportation for half-day kindergarten students. There are a number of children in Indiana who are unable to attend kindergarten because their parent(s) do not have access to transportation during the day.

Peggy Gisler, Ed.S. and Marge Eberts, Ed.S have a Kindergarten Readiness Checklist of skills your child should have mastered by the time they enter kindergarten. Two other good articles are Ellen H. Parlapiano’s Ready for Kindergarten? and BabyCenter’s Kindergarten Readiness: Is Your Child Ready For School?

Early childhood learning should prepare children for learning and help with socialization. Alison Gopnik has an excellent article in Slate which reports about the results of two new studies, Why Preschool Shouldn’t Be Like School which argues against strict academic programs in preschool. Kate Zernike has an excellent in the New York Times about how some children are literally being pushed out of childhood. In Fast-Tracking to Kindergarten? Zernike writes:

Research suggests that there is little benefit from this kind of tutoring; that young children learn just as much about math, if not more, fitting mixing bowls together on the kitchen floor. But programs like Kumon are gaining from, and generating, parents’ anxiety about what kind of preparation their children will need — and whether parents themselves have what it takes to provide it….

“The best you can say is that they’re useless,” said Alison Gopnik, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, who compared the escalation of supplemental education with Irish elk competing to see which had the biggest antlers.

A key building block to a solid education foundation is preschool. There are many different considerations in selecting a preschool. The overall considerations should center on the quality of the preschool and whether it meets the needs of the child. For some, those concerns take a back seat to whether the preschool is the “right” place rather than the appropriate place. “Right” meaning where the parents and child can mingle with the “right” sort or type. The focus of moi’s comment is to urge parents to look at what will in the long term make a happy, healthy, well adjusted child who is secure enough to take on the challenges of life. Nothing in life is guaranteed, even to the most well connected. How one copes with survival in a world that often presents challenges, which upend what people thought they knew, depends on internal fortitude and a sense of security.

For a variety of reasons, despite the budget mess, we need to INVEST in children.

Resources

Pew Center Pre K Now
National Conference of State Legislatures Resources on Kindergarten
Education Commission of the States, Full Day Kindergarten: A Study of State Policies in the United States

Tags: Children and Families, Disparity, Early Learning, Education Achievement, Equal Education, Kindergarten, Preschool

Comments 1 Comment
Categories Dr Wilda

Search

drwilda

University of Chicago study: Kindergarteners are not challenged in math

University of Virginia research: Kindergarten is the new first grade

University of Virginia study: Child-care ratings are often not connected to learning outcomes

Rutgers study: Underfunding of preschool threatens at-risk children

Study Finds Drastic State Pre-K Funding Cuts Put Nation’s Youngest Learners at Risk

The State of Preschool 2012: State Preschool Yearbook

What is the Educare preschool model? https://drwilda.com/2012/11/09/what-is-the-educare-preschool-model/

What is the Educare preschool model?

Continuity of Care

Narrowing the Achievement Gap

Oregon State University study: Ability to pay attention in preschool may predict college success https://drwilda.com/2012/08/08/oregon-state-university-study-ability-to-pay-attention-in-preschool-may-predict-college-success/

Pre-kindergarten programs help at-risk students prepare for school https://drwilda.wordpress.com/2012/07/16/pre-kindergarten-programs-help-at-risk-students-prepare-for-school/

OECD study: U.S. lags behind in preschool enrollment

Education at a Glance 2012: OECD Indicators

Education at a Glance 2012: OECD Indicators

The 2012 edition of Education at a Glance enables countries to see themselves in the light of other countries’ educational performance.

Oregon State University study: Ability to pay attention in preschool may predict college success

Preschool children who can pay attention more likely to finish college 8-6-12

Pre-kindergarten programs help at-risk students prepare for school https://drwilda.wordpress.com/2012/07/16/pre-kindergarten-programs-help-at-risk-students-prepare-for-school/

Pre-kindergarten programs help at-risk students prepare for school

College Board’s ‘Big Future’: Helping low-income kids apply to college https://drwilda.wordpress.com/2012/04/19/college-boards-big-future-helping-low-income-kids-apply-to-college/

A no-brainer: Early childhood learning

Recent Posts

Archives

Categories

Follow Blog via Email

Twitter Updates

Meta

Subscribe to Blog via Email

Translate

Search

Study Finds Drastic State Pre-K Funding Cuts Put Nation’s Youngest Learners at Risk

What is the Educare preschool model? https://drwilda.com/2012/11/09/what-is-the-educare-preschool-model/

Continuity of Care

Narrowing the Achievement Gap

Oregon State University study: Ability to pay attention in preschool may predict college success https://drwilda.com/2012/08/08/oregon-state-university-study-ability-to-pay-attention-in-preschool-may-predict-college-success/

Pre-kindergarten programs help at-risk students prepare for school https://drwilda.wordpress.com/2012/07/16/pre-kindergarten-programs-help-at-risk-students-prepare-for-school/

Education at a Glance 2012: OECD Indicators

Education at a Glance 2012: OECD Indicators The 2012 edition of Education at a Glance enables countries to see themselves in the light of other countries’ educational performance.

Preschool children who can pay attention more likely to finish college 8-6-12

Pre-kindergarten programs help at-risk students prepare for school https://drwilda.wordpress.com/2012/07/16/pre-kindergarten-programs-help-at-risk-students-prepare-for-school/

College Board’s ‘Big Future’: Helping low-income kids apply to college https://drwilda.wordpress.com/2012/04/19/college-boards-big-future-helping-low-income-kids-apply-to-college/

Recent Posts

Archives

Categories

Follow Blog via Email

Meta

Subscribe to Blog via Email

Translate

Education at a Glance 2012: OECD Indicators

The 2012 edition of Education at a Glance enables countries to see themselves in the light of other countries’ educational performance.