Helping families access affordable, quality child care has been the primary focus for the Orange County, North Carolina Smart Start Partnership for Young Children. This study investigated the effects of Smart Start efforts on children's skills at kindergarten entry. Kindergarten teachers rated the cognitive, language and social skills of 39…

Ottawa's program of middle French immersion (MFI) instruction, beginning in fourth grade, was evaluated when the first cohort reached sixth grade. Results of the study were compared with those of other groups, particularly the early French immersion (EFI) program and late French immersion (LFI) program students. The evaluation also added data from…

This paper reviews the research and theories on ethnic identity development, and draws some implications from these ideas for improving curriculum design for, and instructional effectiveness with, ethnically different students, especially Black Americans. The paradigm of "the developmental stages of ethnic identity transformation"…

Having implemented a policy that allowed schools to retain children in kindergarten an extra year, the Boulder Valley Public School District in Colorado conducted a study to determine the cognitive and emotional benefits of retention in kindergarten and the characteristics that led to decisions about retention. The study involved a research review…

The development of economic reasoning in young children is examined from the theoretical perspective of Piaget's work on cognitive development. To determine a possible correlation between grade level and the type of reasoning children use to approach economic problems, 70 urban children, preschool through grade 3, answered questions which measured…

Four elements are essential for efficient, effective, and rewarding teaching of beginning reading. The first is the use of children's key vocabulary. Children are asked, in a prescribed fashion, what their very best word is of the moment. The teacher prints it in a prescribed fashion and uses it to help children acquire one-to-one correspondence…

As part of a series of manuals prepared for reading education workshops for parents and educators, this booklet focuses on reading readiness activities. Divided into three sections, the booklet describes activities for parents to use with their children that develop speaking and listening vocabularies, inquisitiveness for learning, and ability to…

To create the conditions necessary for students to learn basic skills, teachers should facilitate interpersonal situations that will encourage learning. Teachers should operate less on a defensive basis and allow more student-teacher involvement, careful thinking, and demonstrated relevance of knowledge to create a dynamic learning environment.…

This document provides an overview, in table form, of research pertaining to the effects of reading aloud to preschool children, and stresses the important benefits that reading aloud to children has on language development, reading interest, and social attitudes and values. A reference list is included to allow teachers to locate the 12 original…

This study is concerned with the teaching of French grammar to native speakers at the elementary level and specifically considers whether or not students are psychologically ready to handle concepts entailed in the formal instruction of grammar. The sample included 5,900 students in grades 4 through 8 in French schools in Ontario. Subjects…

This study was designed to determine whether chronological age, the number of permanent teeth erupted, or the combination of the two would predict a child's readiness for formal arithmetic work. Sixty-four children were randomly chosen and three phases of testing conducted. The findings did not support the use of the number of teeth erupted as a…

Cognitive developmental learning is a concept expressing the hypothesis that learning has a continuing, cumulative, and transformational function in the development of intelligence. Two important questions are, "How much do we know about methods?" and "What classes of knowledge and abilities should we develop?" An analysis of past investigations,…

The contention that among black people there is a cognitive style which seems to require a more active intervention with the learning environment than what is needed by their white counterpart is advanced in this discussion of cognitive style among black Africans and black Americans. Cognitive styles of blacks in the infant, early school, and…

A prospective longitudinal investigation related 76 maternal and infant variables to performance on the Metropolitan Readiness Tests (MRT) at age six. The 1,245 study subjects have been followed since birth. Their distribution on measures of intelligence and socioeconomic status is essentially normal. Subjects with high MRT scores were found to…

This booklet describes a home and school curriculum for young children developed by the Tucson, Arizona, Parent and Child Education Project (PACE). The curriculum is divided into three main areas to prepare children for every day living and later school learning: The Child, The Child and the Immediate Environment, and The Child and Special Skills.…