This monograph presents information to help educators consider how to determine the best age for each child to begin his or her formal schooling. Trends in state requirements for school entrance age are described, and research in areas such as mental age, reading readiness, child development, screening instruments, and experimental preschool…

The Minnesota Talented Youth Mathematics Project (MTYMP) aimed to accelerate the mathematics learning of extremely talented junior high school pupils in special fast-paced classes outside of the regular school program. During the 1976-77 school year, 65 pupils from Duluth, St. Paul, and Minneapolis, Minnesota earned credit in Algebra I and II.…

This booklet is a collection of articles addressing current issues in early childhood education. The first article, "Would You Like to Pack Away Now?: Improving the Quality of Talk in Early Childhood Programs," (Laurie Makin) addresses how teachers talk to children. The second article, "Persistence When It's Difficult: A Disposition…

Noting that teachers in mixed-ability classrooms face multiple challenges at every grade level, this book provides guidance for teachers who are interested in creating learning environments that address the diversity typical of mixed-ability classrooms. The principles and strategies included can help teachers address a variety of learning…

In January 1991, the National School Readiness Task Force was formed to promote the national goal of assuring that all children start school ready to learn. This report presents the Task Force's considerations and recommendations based on research reviews and interviews with practitioners nationwide. Following a brief discussion of the Task Force…

This book is intended to help early childhood practitioners develop the essential understanding they require for appropriate use of assessment and evaluation information and to illuminate many of the issues involved in formal and informal assessment and evaluation. The chapters are: (1) "Assessment and Evaluation in the Early Childhood…

Selected papers presented in this book are: "Changing Concepts of Self-Direction in Learning" (Long); "The Transition from Learner-Control to Autodidaxy: More than Meets the Eye" (Candy); "Self-Directed Learning and the Theory of Adult Education" (Jarvis); "On the Theme and Variations of Self-Directed…

The Cognitive Skills Assessment Battery (CSAB), a school-readiness test, is administered to all public school students at the beginning of Grade 1 in South Carolina. This test is designed to measure a student's readiness to begin the formal school curriculum. The number of beginning first graders tested in 1992 (54,357) represented a decrease from…

The purpose of this study was to survey the affective and cognitive progress of three classes of pre-first grade transitional students. An introduction discusses the issue of social promotion, or the promotion of a student regardless of the student's degree of mastery of the previous level, as opposed to grade retention. In an extensive literature…

Teachers and students will better understand the experience of learning if they become familiar with a general systems model of the relationship between a teacher and a learner (student). Concepts relevant to this model include learner background, readiness, initiative, and achievement; teacher knowledge, relationship to colleagues, cultural…

This is the final report of the project entitled "A Study to Determine the Degree of Relationship between Linguistic Concepts and Structures in French as a Mother Tongue and Stages of Psychological Readiness of Students at the Junior and Intermediate Levels." The project's primary aim was to determine the psychological readiness, with…

This review of early childhood research examines what has been accomplished in the field and what questions now need to be answered. Project Head Start has had the effect of helping developmental psychology to become more comprehensive and less ethnocentric than previously. Developmental psychologists are now studying infants and toddlers and the…

Ideas, methods, techniques, and materials to aid teachers in the education of migrant children are presented. This guide is the result of 4 weeks of intensive workshop planning and investigation into migrant education by a group of teachers, principals, and agency workers from Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, Oregon, Texas, and California.…

In Arizona and around the country, there is an increased focus on ensuring that children start school ready to learn. Noting that the best way to know if Arizona's children are starting school ready to learn is to track their progress, this booklet details indicators or benchmarks in five categories used to measure the state's progress in school…

This book contains 10 papers based on a data set from the 1994 International Adult Literacy Survey, which collected data from more than 20,000 individual respondents in samples representative of the adult populations in 6 countries: Canada, the Netherlands, Poland, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United States. The papers are: "Foreword"…