Research
The Importance of Aligning Pre-K through 3rd Grade
The Pre-K Coalition has released a new policy brief detailing how aligning early education from pre-K through third grade can increase grade-level reading proficiency and recommending district, state, and federal policy to do so.
Making Summer Count: How Summer Programs Can Boost Children’s Learning
A new study from the RAND Corporation, examines students’ loss of knowledge and educational skills during the summer months. The study, commissioned by the Wallace Foundation, finds that this loss is cumulative over the course of a student’s career and further widens the achievement gap.
Double Jeopardy: How Third-Grade Reading Skills and Poverty Influence High School Graduation
A national study released in April 2011 shows that students who do not read proficiently by third grade are four times more likely to leave high school without a diploma than proficient readers. Poverty compounds the problem: Students who have lived in poverty are three times more likely to drop out or fail to graduate on time than their more affluent peers.
“The Role of Parent-Child Verbal Interaction in Language and Literacy Development”
This research brief gives an overview of studies on vocabulary development and the role of parents’ verbal interaction in early literacy.
PreK-Grade 3: Which Reading and Literacy Practices Matter Most?
The Education Commission of the States released a compilation of research studies that address reading and literacy in grades PreK through third grade.
Teaching by Listening: The Importance of Adult-Child Conversation to Language Development
To help language development in young children, parents should not only talk and read to their children, but engage in two-way conversations. This study, led by UCLA Researcher Frederick Zimmerman, found that while parents should continue to talk, read, and tell their children stories, it is also important to allow children to ask questions and participate in the conversation as a way to improve language development.
Children’s Access to Print Material and Education-Related Outcomes
Children from poorer families have fewer books in their homes or available to them in school and classroom libraries, and they tend to live farther from public libraries than middle-and upper-income children, concludes this literature review, commissioned by Reading is Fundamental. Having access to fewer books and other reading materials, the review by The Learning Point Associates found, contributes to the lower academic performance of low-income children as compared to their more affluent peers.
The Effectiveness of a Program to Accelerate Vocabulary Development in Kindergarten (VOCAB)
Children from disadvantaged backgrounds often have not learned the vocabulary that is required to learn to read and comprehend academic text. This study, prepared by the National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance with the Southern Regional Educational Laboratory, gauges the effectiveness of interventions for building vocabulary skills among kindergarten students.
There are 15.5 million (one in five) children living in poverty, and, when there is a recession, they and their families are often the most vulnerable in terms of Health, food security, housing stability and maltreatment. A new report from the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia found that being poor for even a short period of time can have lasting health implications for children.
Learning: Is There an App for That?
New media is on the rise and as an increasing number of parents are “passing back” this new technology to their kids, more parents, educators and scholars question whether young children should be using these devices. A new report from the Joan Ganz Cooney Center finds that parents doubt the educational value of mobile apps; however, they do support new experimentation.
Socioeconomic Disadvantage, School Attendance, and Early Cognitive Development: The Differential Effects of School Exposure
Researchers have long recognized the connection between children’s socio-economic status and their cognitive abilities. A new study looks at the extent to which school absences in the early grades exacerbate these class differences and fuel the nagging achievement gap.
Improving Reading Comprehension in Kindergarten
Through Third Grade
Students who read with understanding at an early age gain access to a broader range of texts, knowledge, and educational opportunities, making early reading comprehension instruction particularly critical. This guide from the What Works Clearinghouse recommends five specific steps that teachers, reading coaches, and principals can take to successfully improve reading comprehension for young readers.
Family and Neighborhood Sources of Socioeconomic
Inequality in Children’s Achievement
A study in the August 2010 issue of the scientific journal Demography looked at data from Los Angeles neighborhood surveys to examine the relationship between socioeconomic status and children’s reading and math skills. Researchers Narayan Sastry of the RAND Corp. and Anne R. Pebley of UCLA “found sizable observed socioeconomic inequalities in children’s skills according to mother’s reading achievement and years of schooling, family income and assets, and neighborhood median family income.”
Infants of Depressed Mothers Living in Poverty:
Opportunities to Identify and Serve
A new study from the Urban Institute looks at incidence of depression in low-income mothers and its impact on parenting and child development.
“A mom who is too sad to get up in the morning won’t be able to take care of all of her child’s practical needs,” researcher Olivia Golden, who co-authored the paper with two colleagues at the District-based Urban Institute, told The Washington Post. “If she is not able to take joy in her child, talk baby talk, play with the child – those are features of parenting that brain development research has told us contribute to babies’ and toddlers’ successful development.”
Early Learning’s Link to Adult Outcomes
Research from the National Science Foundation’s Division of Social and Economic Sciences finds that children who learn more in kindergarten go on to earn more as adults and are more successful overall, according to a Science Daily piece. Taking into account all variation across kindergarten classes (including class size), children who learn more — as measured by an above-average score on the Stanford Achievement Test — and are in smaller classes earn about $2,000 more per year at age 27. Moreover, students who learn more in kindergarten are more likely to go to college than students with similar backgrounds. Those who learn more in kindergarten are also less likely to become single parents, more likely to own a home by age 28, and more likely to save for retirement earlier in their work lives. “Kindergarten interventions matter a great deal for long-term outcomes,” said Harvard economist John Friedman, an author of the report. “For instance, being in a smaller class for two years increases the probability of attending college by 2 percent.” Researchers recently presented results of the new study, which has yet to be peer-reviewed, at an academic conference in Cambridge, Mass.
Yes We Can: The Scott 50-State Report on Public Education and Black Males 2010
The latest biennial report on Black males and public education, released today by the Scott Foundation for Public Education, reveals the overall graduation rate for Black males in the U.S. was only 47 percent for the 2007-08 school year. The report shows that half of the states have graduation rates for Black male students below the national average. In addition to a national summary and detailed state-by-state data, the report highlights the success of New Jersey’s Abbott plan, which demonstrates that when equitable resources are available to all students, systemic change at the state level can yield significant results. New Jersey is now the only state with a significant Black population with a greater than 65 percent high school graduation rate for Black male students.
Using Data to Promote Collaboration in Local School Readiness Systems
Efforts to prepare our youngest children fro school are often fragmented and isolated in silos, according to a new study by the National Neighborhood Indicators Partnership and the Urban Institute. The study of eight cities found that children in need of services are often concentrated in low-income neighborhoods and that the best results are likely when a collaboration of stakeholders, inside and outside government, adopts a coherent school readiness system.
Overall improvements in child well-being that began in the late 1990s stalled in the years just before the current economic downturn. The 21st-annual data book includes national data and state-by-state data and rankings on 10 key indicators of child well-being.
Minority Children Face More Obstacles to Success
Minority children and teenagers have fewer opportunities than white counterparts to be healthy, obtain a quality education and achieve economic success, according to a national survey of adults whose jobs involve children’s education, health and economic well-being. The groundbreaking poll was released by the independent W.K. Kellogg Foundation, which sought to gauge the level of disparities affecting children of color.
The Consequences of Child Poverty
Childhood poverty can have significant detrimental effects on cognitive development and success later when those children enter adulthood, according to this study using recent data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics.
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