education

Implementation “An official curriculum is meaningless unless it is translated by teachers into an operational curriculum” (Posner, 2004, p. 191). The delicate dance of choosing and acting out strategies that ensure desired learning in real preschool and school settings may be the hardest part of teaching. Research shows that perhaps the best predictor of high-quality […]

Identifying Stakeholders As we learned in Chapter 1, all early childhood teachers must be aware that the decisions they make about curriculum affect not only the children in their classrooms but also the immediate and larger community (Bronfenbrenner, 1979). Stakeholders are those people who have a vested interest in or can be affected by the

NIEER Public Preschool Data Publicly funded preschool programs served 1.3 million 3- and 4-year-old children in 20102011. Note: Data from more recent NIEER yearbooks may be available. Visit http://nieer.org/state-preschool-yearbooks for updates. Barnett, W. S., Carolan, M. E., Fitzgerald, J., & Squires, J. H. (2011). The state of preschool 2011: State preschool yearbook. New Brunswick, NJ:

Approved Curricula for State-Funded Preschool Programs In 2011, thirty-nine of the fifty states (Figure 2.3) provided publicly funded preschool programs; in Oklahoma, Florida, and Vermont, for example, these enrolled as many as 75 percent of 4-year-olds. Place Your Order Here!

Brain Research In the past two decades research in the field of neuroscience has provided irrefutable evidence of the importance of the early childhood period to the development of the brain (this is discussed more fully in Chapter 4 and later chapters). As a result, early childhood curriculum developers are learning more and more about

The Search for a “Perfect” Curriculum Wouldn’t it be great if we could figure out the perfect curriculum? Project Follow Through (FT) and the Head Start Planned Variation studies were research efforts that attempted to do exactly that (Stebbins, 1977). These two longitudinal studies emerged from the national Head Start program. By 1967, the Johnson

Perry Preschool Study Data The Perry Preschool Project has tracked the progress of 123 African American subjects since 1965. The age 40 data continue to provide evidence of positive effects. Source: High Scope Educational Research Foundation Place Your Order Here!

Longitudinal Studies on the Benefits of Preschool In addition to studying students for several months or a year in a day-care setting, laboratory school, or other classroom environment, researchers often seek to understand the long-term impact of early childhood education. Hence they institute longitudinal studies to track the same individuals over periods of several years

Laboratory Schools In the early twentieth century, G. Stanley Hall, an American psychologist, was a principal founder of what we now consider the field of child psychology (Barbour, 2003). To conduct research into how the minds of children work, he and his colleagues needed access to natural but controlled settings where subjects could be observed

Basis in Theory and Research The educators who develop curricula for young children are informed and influenced by ongoing research that continually refines our understanding of how children learn. Thousands of researchers from around the world, coming from a variety of perspectives, have contributed to our body of knowledge on early childhood. However, they often