New Report from the Albert Shanker Institute Shows the Benefits of High-Quality Pre-K: Preschool Curriculum: What’s In It for Children and Teachers
Washington, December 11— What are very young children capable of learning? What are the potential cognitive gains of the preschool years? How can preschools maximize these gains so as to help reduce America’s enduring achievement gap?
Today, the Albert Shanker Institute (ASI) and American Federation of Teachers (AFT) convened a group of educators, practitioners, and child development experts to discuss a new Shanker Institute report, Preschool Curriculum: What’s In It for Children and Teachers. The report synthesizes the best research on how young children learn in the domains of language, literacy, mathematics, and science and discusses the implications for improving preschool education. It suggests that early, age-appropriate instruction in these academic domains can have large, long-lasting effects on preschool children’s social and cognitive skills. Moreover, aggressive, expanded instruction in these domains may yield economic benefits by reducing the learning disparities between rich and poor children that predate preschool and escalate through elementary and into middle school.
Distinguished by its lively and jargon-free format, this brief publication is designed to reach all audiences—from pre-K teachers, center directors, and parents to elected officials and policymakers. As such, it meets a rising need. President-Elect Barack Obama and his advisors, along with a growing list of government officials, economists, and educators see expanded preschool education as a way of making dramatic gains for our children with a relatively small down payment.
James Heckman, a Nobel Prize-winning economist, has written that “Universal preschool is a great investment for states and the federal government.” He has also said that “societies that invest in preschool tend to do better economically and create more competitive workers. The brain race doesn’t begin after college, it starts before kindergarten.” Or, as President-Elect Obama noted in the Las Vegas presidential debate earlier this year, for every dollar we invest in early childhood education, “we get $10 back in reduced welfare rolls, lower healthcare costs, and less crime.”
Preschool Curriculum: What’s In It for Children and Teachers provides detailed, research-driven recommendations for what preschool-aged children should be learning. While 43 states and the District of Columbia have adopted early childhood standards designed to prepare children to take on the academic requirements of the elementary grades, these standards are of varying quality, often underestimate what young children are capable of absorbing, and are not always adapted to the unique ways in which young children learn best.
“Especially in these recessionary times, we need to ensure that every dollar we invest in our children’s education has the maximum impact,” said Albert Shanker Institute and American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten. “Early childhood education is an essential investment. But to ensure that it actually yields the intended results—meaning that we increase the likelihood that all children, especially children who grow up in poverty, come to school ready to learn—we must provide our preschool teachers with research-backed methods and materials that challenge students and build on their natural curiosity and desire to learn. That is the import of this new report by the Shanker Institute.”
“The research clearly shows that young children are capable of learning much more than was previously thought,” said early childhood education expert Barbara Bowman, a past president of both the Erikson Institute and the National Association for the Education of Young Children. “All of us have a stake in ensuring that all children have the opportunity to succeed in school; this means giving them access to rich content and quality instruction as early as possible.”
“Most poor children enter preschool at a disadvantage,” explained Susan Neuman, former U.S. Assistant Secretary for Elementary and Secondary Education. “They have fewer books at home, know fewer vocabulary words, and have less access to the libraries, museums, and stimulating educational materials that that engage children in learning. A good preschool curriculum, such as the one described in this report, could help to close this knowledge and opportunity gap.”
Preschool Curriculum: What’s In It for Children and Teachers makes recommendations in the following academic domains:
Oral Language: According to the ASI report, in order for pre-K programs to help close the academic achievement gap, oral language must be a primary focus. A study by Hart and Risley, “The 30 Million Word Gap by Age 3,” found that 3 year-olds who grew up in poverty possessed half the vocabulary of their middle-class peers. This vocabulary gap remained five years later at age 9. Thus, the amount of dialogue between preschool children and caregivers can be seen as a key determinant of instructional quality. Reading aloud about a broad range of topics and active classroom discussions should be used to help build children’s vocabulary and develop their background knowledge. Among the accomplishments preschoolers should master are a range of listening and speaking skills that help train students for classroom participation in elementary school and conversation with both peers and adults.
Literacy: According to the ASI report, literacy development begins at birth and early experiences with literacy have lasting effects as children develop the attitudes, knowledge, and skills that prepare them to become readers and writers. In addition to developing the rich vocabulary and broad background knowledge that they will need to comprehend texts, preschool students should be taught how to hear and manipulate the sounds in oral language (phonological awareness) and to name and recognize letters of the alphabet so that, eventually, they can put it all together by matching sounds with letters of the alphabet. Also, children should gain an understanding of the conventions of print, such as how to turn pages and in which direction to read.
Mathematics: As with language and pre-reading skills, children who grow up in poverty tend to enter school already lagging behind their middle-class peers in developing key mathematics knowledge and skills—a gap which can foreshadow later academic struggles. Although educators once wondered whether mathematics instruction was appropriate for pre-K children, research now indicates that children are “predisposed” to learn simple mathematics as early as infancy. In pre-K, teachers can help children to build on this natural predisposition through instruction, games, and hands-on activities that focus on five major areas of mathematics: number and operation, algebra, geometry, measurement, and data analysis and collection.
Science: Young children are naturally curious about the world, and they regularly ask “why” and “how” questions that logically lead to scientific inquiry. Pre-K science can capitalize on children’s natural desire to discover new information and explore new ideas through guided activities and free exploration using science tools and materials. According to the ASI report, a strong pre-K program should help children develop science knowledge in physical science, life science, and earth science. Teachers can and should lead scientific queries, introduce science vocabulary, and integrate science with mathematics and literacy. Science should also be hands-on with students, using magnets, magnifying glasses, rulers, timers, and other instruments.
