Research

[Voting concluded at 9 a.m. on April 9. Thanks for your input. Based on your votes, I'll be working on #9, #4 and #1. (See my note in the comment field for the full tally.) Stay tuned! -LG]

By the time the biennial meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development concluded in Denver on Saturday, thousands of research projects had been presented and discussed, critiqued and disputed. Even the most conscientious attendee at the conference could not have learned about even a fraction of them.

Thank goodness, then, for the 464-page conference program and its online searchable database. Anyone who is motivated to dig in further can search by topic or author to see what was missed. You could even contact the researchers for more information, if you're so inclined.

At Early Ed Watch, we are, indeed, so inclined. But even when we narrow our search to include only those papers with direct bearing on early childhood policy, the possibilities are overwhelming. That is why, dear Early Ed Watch reader, we are asking for your help.

DENVER -- Preliminary results unveiled yesterday from three new education studies show some surprising and complicated connections between young children's math and attention skills and their ability to do well in school. The studies also highlight how difficult it can be to draw a straight line from one skill at age 4 or 5 to strong test scores or good learning practices in later school years.

The findings, which have not yet been published, rely on data collected in national surveys of thousands of children throughout the United States. The papers were presented on the first day of the biennial meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development, one of the premiere conferences for research on how children develop and learn.   

A child-advocacy group called the Alliance for Childhood recently released a white paper with a head-turning title: "Crisis in the Kindergarten: Why Children Need to Play in School."  A press release accompanying the report carries the dramatic headline: "Kindergarten Playtime Disappears, Raising Alarm on Children's Learning and Health."

The report is right to raise the profile of playtime. We agree that it is time to talk seriously about how to ensure that early childhood teachers allow children some much-needed time for active, child-centered play. Through workshops and professional development programs, teachers should be trained in methods that give children space and time to launch themselves into pretend-play scenarios around, say, a make-believe hospital or space shuttle. Kindergarteners need time to figure out for themselves why a block tower won't stand up or whether their kite will fly. 

Oh, parents. Oh, researchers. What are we going to do with you two?

Those are the collective sighs emanating from several new studies on media and young children that appeared last week. One report chides parents for not knowing enough about what experts recommend when it comes to TV time. Another takes researchers to task for not paying enough attention to how children are affected by the actual content on the screen -- the language and actions of characters and how their stories are told.

And a third study  -- which, tsk, tsk, yet again didn't attempt to analyze content -- showed that TV viewing in children's earliest years did not appear to have an effect on their cognitive skills at age 3, at least in doses of an hour or less a day. The researchers held up the report as more evidence that putting young children in front of videos will not make them any smarter.

Consider an education program so effective that its impact can be measured 19 years later, so well-studied that it can be backed up with decades of scientific evidence on children's improved skills in math and reading, and so impressive to policymakers that it continues to be championed around the country 40 years after its launch.

February 17: All Eyes on Illinois…
February 19: Duncan’s Record in Chicago
February 23: Q-and-A with Barbara Bowman
Today: What’s been cut

These are the superlatives that come with Chicago's Child Parent Centers. So you might figure they're flourishing as part of the Chicago Public Schools' early childhood programs, right? Not so. Their numbers are dwindling. In the mid-1980s, there were at least 25 CPCs serving more than 1,500 children. By 2006, there were 13. Today, 11 are still open, according to the Promising Practices Network. Enrollment in 2009, as reported by the Chicago Public Schools, is down to 670, less than half of what it once was. It now represents just 2 percent of the system's total preschool enrollment.

The distressing story of the CPCs needs to be told. In this series, we have examined Illinois's early childhood framework and its Preschool for All program, as well as U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan's record in Chicago. Both offer helpful lessons for structuring and funding early childhood programs. But the CPCs offer some of the strongest lessons of all, and their closures send a warning about how difficult it can be to sustain the programs that have been shown to do the most good.  It's a shame that even in an environment brimming with early childhood advocates, the CPCs haven't been able to gain ground. And it begs the question: If Chicago can't make this happen, who can?

A recent study in Early Education and Development looks at what skills parents believe their children must have in order to be kindergarten-ready.

Research Findings: This study analyzed the school readiness beliefs of parents of 452 children from public pre-kindergarten and the relations of these beliefs to socio-economic status and children's readiness skills. Parents conceived readiness largely in terms of the ability to name objects, letters, or numbers, but few included inferential skills. Readiness beliefs were related not to socioeconomic status but to ethnicity. Readiness beliefs about the importance of independence, social competence, nominal knowledge, and inferential skills were related in expected ways to children's skills. Practice or Policy: Infrequent inclusion of inferential skills among parents' readiness beliefs may not bode well for children. Informational programs for parents about the critical role of higher order cognitive skills and ways to promote them are needed.

A new study in the November/December 2008 issue of Child Development looks at the impacts of an intervention designed to improve Head Start students' language, literacy, and social-emotional skills:

Forty-four Head Start classrooms were randomly assigned to enriched intervention (Head Start REDI—Research-based, Developmentally Informed) or "usual practice" conditions. The intervention involved brief lessons, "hands-on" extension activities, and specific teaching strategies linked empirically with the promotion of: (a) social-emotional competencies and (b) language development and emergent literacy skills. Take-home materials were provided to parents to enhance skill development at home. Multimethod assessments of three hundred and fifty-six 4-year-old children tracked their progress over the course of the 1-year program. Results revealed significant differences favoring children in the enriched intervention classrooms on measures of vocabulary, emergent literacy, emotional understanding, social problem solving, social behavior, and learning engagement. Implications are discussed for developmental models of school readiness and for early educational programs and policies.

Over the past 6 months, I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about educational innovation, because Andy Rotherham and I have been writing a paper for the Brookings Institution on the federal role in supporting educational innovation. One of the things that’s become increasingly clear to me is that the early education sector is much more innovative—and offers a much more hospitable climate for innovators—than the K-12 education system.

The current generation of young adults may be the first since World War II, possibly the first in American history, to be less educated than the generation that preceded them, according to a new report from the American Councils on Education. The report, Minorities in Higher Education 2008, is the 23rd annual report looking at trends in college enrollment and completion by race and ethnicity.

This dropoff in educational attainment, which economists have described as a skills slowdown, is due in large part to widening educational attainment gaps between white and Asian young adults and their black and Latino peers. While white and Asian adults ages 25-29 are more likely to have a college degree than whites and Asians over age 30, black and Latino adults ages 25-39 are less likely to have college degrees than those over age 30. Add in stagnation in attainment among many subgroups of white young adults, and demographic changes, and you get an overall trend towards skill stagnation and possibly even decline.

Researchers in England have identified a gene linked to poor reading ability. Previous research had identified a correlation between the gene and dyslexia, but this research shows a correlation between the gene and poor reading ability among non-dyslexic children, as well. While the presence of the gene correlated with poorer reading performance in a population of 6000 children, ages 7 to 9, it does not affect overall cognitive abilities. Further research is needed to better understand the role this gene plays in affecting reading abilities and children's brain development.