“Two decades of child development research tell us that small kids need two things above all else to get off to the best possible start: nurturing interaction with caregivers and protection from toxic stress. Over the past five years a new wave of neuroscientific studies, highlighting the neurobiological effects of early experience, has strongly pointed toward […]
“Whoever thought that you could provide a 4-year-old from an impoverished family with 5 1/2 hours a day, nine months a year of preschool, and close the achievement gap, and send them to college at a higher rate? she asks. I mean, why? Why do we put so much pressure on our pre-K programs?” We […]
“A study last year raised questions about the extent of the gap, but the science is clear that children’s first three years are the most critical time for brain development.
The monitoring began in 2012 with an observational tool called Class, which is devised to measure teaching quality. Developed at the University of Virginia, it quantifies three aspects of a teacher’s performance: instructional support, emotional support and classroom organization.”
“The researchers found that greater screen time at 24 months was associated with poorer performance on developmental screening tests at 36 months, and greater screen time at 36 months was associated with lower scores on developmental screening tests at 60 months.”
“Children who help more at home feel a larger sense of obligation and connectedness to their parents, and that connection helps them weather life’s stressful moments — in other words, it helps them be happier.”
The other argument is that increasing credential requirements without first raising wages places too much of a burden on already-overtaxed teachers. Mary Alice McCarthy, director of the Center on Education and Skills at the New America foundation, has proffered a different approach: apprenticeships. Like many human-service jobs, she says, teaching is best taught through “iterative […]
It’s not just that the Tulsa preschoolers were ahead of their peers academically when they got to kindergarten… When the researchers used the Tulsa data to project the impact of the program into adulthood, they concluded that because of those youngsters’ higher projected income and diminished likelihood of incarceration, every dollar invested in quality preschool […]
Math predicts reading; reading does not predict math. We don’t know why.”
Effective pre-K classrooms teach self-regulation through songs and routines; picture prompts can remind children of the steps in a process. Skilled preschool teachers have strategies for redirecting student behavior and use language that provides instruction.”
The school reform movement has pushed to bring more formal math and phonics concepts into the preschool curriculum. At the same time, education experts I trust say academics and play don’t exist on opposite ends of a spectrum. Rather, in an effective classroom, they are intermixed.”