Preschool and Kindergarten Education – Latest Research
By Jonathan D.
Kantrowitz
Published by
Tsadek Press
Copyright,
Jonathan Kantrowitz 2014
8.5 x 11, 197 pages
$12.95
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2 Tsadek Press books $19.95
3 Tsadek Press books $24.95
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Topics Covered:
Intellectual
Development
Play Time and Intellectual Development
Play Time and Intellectual Development
Self-regulation
and Intellectual Development
Language
Development
Learning
Mathematics
Motor Skills
Physical Development
Motor Skills
Physical Development
Health
and Safety
Interactions
with Teachers
Interacting
with Parents
Interacting
with Peers
Preparing
for Kindergarten
Kindergarten
Learning Affects Future Success
Mental
Health Issues
Learning
A Second Language
ADHD
Teacher
Evaluation
Parent
Support Training
Head
Start
Policy
Issues
Sample reports:
Preschoolers
Use Statistics to Understand Others
Children are natural psychologists. By the time
they’re in preschool, they understand that other people have desires,
preferences, beliefs, and emotions. But how they learn this isn’t clear. A
study published August 2010 in Psychological
Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, finds that
children figure out another person’s preferences by using a topic you’d think
they don’t encounter until college: statistics.
In one experiment, children aged 3 and 4 saw a
puppet named “Squirrel” remove five toys of the same type from a container full
of toys and happily play with them. Across children, the toys that Squirrel
removed were the same (for example, all five were blue flowers). What varied,
however, were the contents of the container. For one-third of the children, 100
percent of the toys were the same type (so, in this example, all were blue
flowers). For another third of the children, only 50 percent were that type
(that is, half were blue flowers and half were red circles). Finally, for the
last third of the children only 18 percent were of that type (that is, 82
percent were red circles). Later on, children were asked to give Squirrel a toy
that he likes. The children were more likely to give Squirrel the blue flowers
if he had selected them out of the container that had other toys in it.
More amazingly, the proportion of other toys
mattered as well; they gave Squirrel the blue flowers more when the container
included only 18 percent blue flowers, and slightly less often when the
container had 50 percent blue flowers. When the container had 100 percent blue
flowers, they gave him toys at random. That means the child inferred that the
puppet liked blue flowers best if the sample of five toys didn’t match the
proportion of toys in the population (the container). This is a statistical
phenomenon known as non-random sampling.
In another experiment, 18- to 24-month-olds also
learned about the preferences of an adult experimenter from non-random
sampling. They watched the adult choose five toys that were either 18 percent
or 82 percent of the toys in a box. The adult played happily with the toy
either way, but the toddler only concluded that the adult had a preference if
they’d picked the toys from a box in which that toy was scarce.
Of course, statistical information isn’t the
only way children learn about the preferences of other people. Emotion and
verbalization are also important—but this is a new cue that no one had
identified before, says Tamar Kushnir of Cornell University. She carried out
the study with Fei Xu of the University of California, Berkeley and Henry M.
Wellman of the University of Michigan.
“Babies are amazing,” says Kushnir. “Babies and
children are like little scientists. Mostly they learn by observing and
experiencing the world. Just let them do it. Later on, there will be time for
formal instruction, but when they’re really young, this sort of informal
learning is critical.”
Regular bedtimes linked to better language,
reading and math skills in preschool children
Children in households with bedtime rules and
children who get adequate sleep score higher on a range of developmental
assessments.
Results indicate that among sleep habits, having
a regular bedtime was the most consis¬tent predictor of positive developmental
outcomes at 4 years of age. Scores for receptive and expressive language,
phonological awareness, literacy and early math abilities were higher in
children whose parents reported having rules about what time their child goes
to bed. Having an earlier bedtime also was predictive of higher scores for most
developmental measures.
The study also provides a wealth of information
about typical sleep patterns in 4-year-old children. According to the American
Academy of Sleep Medicine, preschool children should get a minimum of 11 hours
of sleep each night. Getting less than this recommended amount of sleep, the
study's authors found, was associated with lower scores on phonological
awareness, literacy and early math skills. The data show that many children are
not getting the recommended amount of sleep, which may have negative
consequences for their development and school achievement.
"Getting parents to set bedtime routines
can be an important way to make a significant impact on children's emergent
literacy and language skills," said lead author Erika Gaylor, PhD, early childhood
policy researcher for SRI International, an independent, nonprofit research
institute in Menlo Park, Calif. "Pediatricians can easily promote regular
bedtimes with parents and children, behaviors which in turn lead to healthy
sleep."
Gaylor recommended that parents can help their
preschooler get sufficient sleep by setting an appropriate time for their child
to go to bed and interacting with their child at bedtime using routines such as
reading books or telling stories.
The study involved a nationally representative
sample of approximately 8,000 children who completed a direct assessment at 4
years of age as part of the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study – Birth Cohort.
This analysis included information from parent phone interviews when their child
was 9 months old and again when their child was 4 years old. Nighttime sleep
duration was based on parent-reported usual bedtime and wake time.
Developmental outcomes were assessed using a shortened set of items from
standardized assessments. Results were controlled for potential confounders
such as child and bedtime characteristics.
"This is by far the largest study of its
kind to date. Previous studies have included up to 500 children in this age
group," Gaylor said. "It's fortunate to have this rich dataset
available for analysis."
Last year a study in the August 2009 issue of Sleep Medicine also emphasized the
importance of an early bedtime and consistent bedtime routine for children. It
reported that children with a bedtime after 9 p.m. took longer to fall asleep
and had a shorter total sleep time. Children without a consistent bedtime
routine also were reported to obtain less sleep.
Children’s complex thinking
skills begin forming before they go to school
New
research at the University of Chicago and the University of North Carolina at
Chapel Hill shows that children begin to show signs of higher-level thinking
skills as young as age 4 1/2. Researchers have previously attributed
higher-order thinking development to knowledge acquisition and better
schooling, but the new longitudinal study shows that other skills, not always
connected with knowledge, play a role in the ability of children to reason
analytically.
The
findings, reported in January 2013 in the journal Psychological Science, show for the first time that children’s
executive function has a role in the development of complicated analytical
thinking. Executive function includes such complex skills as planning,
monitoring, task switching, and controlling attention. High early executive function
skills at school entry are related to higher than average reasoning skills in
adolescence.
Growing
research suggests that executive function may be trainable through pathways,
including preschool curriculum, exercise and impulse control training. Parents
and teachers may be able to help encourage development of executive function by
having youngsters help plan activities, learn to stop, think, and then take
action, or engage in pretend play, said lead author of the study, Lindsey
Richland, assistant professor of comparative human development at the
University of Chicago.
Although
important to a child’s education, “little is known about the cognitive
mechanisms underlying children’s development of the capacity to engage in
complex forms of reasoning,” Richland said.
The
new research is reported in the paper “Early Executive Function Predicts
Reasoning Development” and follows the development of complex reasoning in
children from before the time they go to school until they are 15. Richland’s
co-author is Margaret Burchinal, senior scientist at the Frank Porter Graham
Child Development Institute at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
The
two studied the acquisition of analogical thinking, one form of complex
reasoning. “The ability to see relationships and similarities between disparate
phenomena is fundamental to analytical and inductive reasoning, and is closely
related to measurements of general fluid intelligence,” said Richland.
Developing complex reasoning ability is particularly fundamental to the
innovation and adaptive thinking skills necessary for a modern workforce, she
pointed out.
Richland
and Burchinal studied a database of 1,364 children who were part of the Early
Child Care and Youth Development study from birth through age 15. The group was
fairly evenly divided between boys and girls and included families from a
diverse cross-section of ethnic and income backgrounds.
The
current study examined tests children took when they were 4 ½, when they were
in first grade, third grade, and when they were 15. Because the study was
longitudinal, the same children were tested at each interval. Among the tests
they took were ones to measure analytical reasoning, executive function,
vocabulary knowledge, short-term memory and sustained attention.
Children
were tested at 4 ½ on their ability to monitor and control their automatic
responses to stimuli. In first grade they worked on a test that judged their
ability to move objects in a “Tower of Hanoi” game, in which they had to move
disks between pegs in a specific order.
In
third grade and at 15 years old, they were tested on their ability to
understand analogies, asked in third grade for instance to complete the
question “dog is to puppy as cat is to__?” As 15-year-olds they were asked to
complete written tests of analogies.
The
study found a strong relationship between high scores among children who as
preschoolers had strong vocabularies and were good at monitoring and
controlling their responses (executive function) to later ability on tests of
understanding analogies.
“Overall,
these results show that knowledge is necessary for using thinking skills, as
shown by the importance of early vocabulary, but also inhibitory control and
executive function skills are important contributors to children’s analytical
reasoning development,” Richland said.
Diet,
Parental Behavior, and Preschool Can Boost Children’s IQ
Supplementing children’s diets with fish oil,
enrolling them in quality preschool, and engaging them in interactive reading all
turn out to be effective ways to raise a young child’s intelligence, according
to a report published January 2013 in Perspectives
on Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological
Science.
Using a technique called meta-analysis, a team
led by John Protzko, a doctoral student at the NYU Steinhardt School of
Culture, Education, and Human Development, combined the findings from existing
studies to evaluate the overall effectiveness of each type of intervention. In
collaboration with NYU Steinhardt professors Joshua Aronson and Clancy Blair,
leaders in the field of intelligence, Protzko analyzed the best available
studies involving samples of children from birth and kindergarten from their
newlyassembled “Database of Raising Intelligence.”
“Our aim in creating this database is to learn
what works and what doesn’t work to raise people’s intelligence,” said Protzko.
“For too long, findings have been disconnected and scattered throughout a wide
variety of journals. The broad consensus about what works is founded on only
two or three very high-profile studies.”
All of the studies in this database rely on a
normal population (participants without clinical diagnoses of intellectual
disabilities), focus on interventions that are sustained over time, use widely
accepted measures of intelligence, and, most importantly, are randomly
controlled trials (participants selected at random to receive one of the
interventions).
“The larger goal here is to understand the
nature of intelligence, and if and how it can be nurtured at every stage of
development,” said Aronson, Protzko’s advisor. “This is just a first step in a
long process of understanding. It is by no means the last word. In fact, one of
the main conclusions is how little high quality research exists in the field
and how much more needs to be done.”
Overall, the results of the meta-analyses
indicated that certain dietary and environmental interventions can be effective
in raising children’s IQ.
Supplementing pregnant women and newborns with
long-chain polyunsaturated fatty acids, foods rich in Omega-3, were found to
boost children’s IQ by more than 3.5 points. These essential fatty acids may
help raise intelligence by providing the building blocks for nerve cell
development that the body cannot produce on its own.
There is insufficient research, however, to
determine whether other types of supplements — including iron, B-complex
vitamins, riboflavin, thiamine, niacin, and zinc — have beneficial effects on
intelligence.
Enrolling an economically disadvantaged child
into an early education intervention was found to raise his or her IQ by more
than four points; interventions that specifically included a center-based
education component raised a child’s IQ by more than seven points.
The researchers hypothesize that early education
interventions may help to raise children’s IQ by increasing their exposure to
complex environments that are cognitively stimulating and demanding. It’s not
clear, however, whether these results apply more broadly to kids from different
socioeconomic backgrounds.
Surprisingly, Protzko, Aronson, and Blair found
no evidence to support the idea that early education interventions that take
place earlier in childhood are more effective than those that begin later.
Interventions focused on interactive reading —
teaching parents how to engage their children while reading with them — were
found to raise children’s IQ by over 6 points. These interventions do not seem
to have an effect for children over 4 years old, suggesting that the
interventions may accelerate language development, which, in turn, boosts IQ.
Sending a child to preschool was found to raise
his or her IQ by more than four points, and preschools that include a language
development component were found to boost IQ by more than seven points. The
link between preschool and intelligence could be a function of increased
exposure to language or the result of the overall cognitive complexity of the
preschool environment.
“Our current findings strengthen earlier conclusions
that complex environments build intelligence, but do cast doubt on others,
including evidence that earlier interventions are always most effective,”
Protzko explained. “Overall, identifying the link between essential fatty acids
and intelligence gives rise to tantalizing new questions for future research
and we look forward to exploring this finding.”
Preschoolers
exposure to television can stall their cognitive development
Television is a powerful agent of development
for children, particularly those in preschool. But when could too much TV be
detrimental to a young child's mind? A November 2013 paper published in the Journal of Communication found that
preschoolers who have a TV in their bedroom and are exposed to more background
TV have a weaker understanding of other people's beliefs and desires.
Amy Nathanson, Molly Sharp, Fashina Aladé, Eric
Rasmussen, and Katheryn Christy, all of The Ohio State University, interviewed
and tested 107 children and their parents to determine the relationship between
preschoolers' television exposure and their understanding of mental states,
such as beliefs, intentions, and feelings, known as theory of mind. Parents
were asked to report how many hours of TV their children were exposed to,
including background TV. The children were then given tasks based on theory of
mind. These tasks assessed whether the children could acknowledge that others
can have different beliefs and desires, that beliefs can be wrong, and that
behaviors stem from beliefs.
The researchers found that having a bedroom TV
and being exposed to more background TV was related to a weaker understanding
of mental states, even after accounting for differences in performance based on
age and the socioeconomic status of the parent. However, preschoolers whose
parents talked with them about TV performed better on theory of mind
assessments.
Many studies have investigated the effects of
children's TV exposure on social behaviors, without examining if TV exposure
affects the neuropsychological function that underlies social behavior, and
without taking theory of mind into consideration. This study shows that TV
exposure may impair children's theory of mind development, and this impairment
may be partly responsible for disruptive social behaviors.
"When children achieve a theory of mind,
they have reached a very important milestone in their social and cognitive
development," said lead researcher Nathanson. "Children with more
developed theories of mind are better able to participate in social relationships.
These children can engage in more sensitive, cooperative interactions with
other children and are less likely to resort to aggression as a means of
achieving goals."
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