Hart and Risley's (1995) concept of a "word gap" (aka "language gap") is widely used to describe inferior cognitive development and lower academic achievement as by-products of the language patterns of families from economically disadvantaged backgrounds. In recent decades, this line of deficit research has proliferated and…

Head Start was designed as a holistic intervention to improve economically disadvantaged, preschool-aged children's cognitive and social development by providing a comprehensive set of educational, health, nutritional, and social services, as well as opportunities for parent involvement (Zigler & Valentine, 1979). Given the current interest in ECE…

Economic inequality is high and rising in a number of developed countries, including in the United Kingdom and the United States. There are growing concerns that this may have negative implications for equality of opportunity, and the extent to which social disadvantage is transmitted across generations. It is widely believed that providing…

Significant resources have been directed at understanding and alleviating the achievement gap in education. Most programs focused on this aim rely on a top-down approach, including funding for infrastructure improvement, curriculum development, class size, and teacher salaries. This article presents findings from a randomized field trial that…

Cognitive and academic behaviors promoted by an ongoing, long-term Direct Instruction preschool project for poverty level children (N=109) are described. Children who received two years of training achieved at substantially higher normative levels than children trained for only one year and this advantage continued in first and second grades.…

Attendance in preschool centers can yield short-term benefits for children from poor or middle-class families. Yet debate persists in Europe and the United States over whether centers yield gains of sufficient magnitude to sustain children's cognitive or social advantages as they move through primary school. We report on child care and home…

Heckman et al. discuss how cost-benefit analysis of prekindergarten education programs demonstrates that the highest per child benefits stem from programs that focus on economically disadvantaged children. Indeed, studies have shown that these children make significant gains in cognition, social-emotional development, and educational performance…

The effects of early educational intervention on the attainment of the Piagetian cognitive stage of concrete operations by 86 socioeconomically disadvantaged children aged 5, 6, and 7 years were assessed. The Concept Assessment Kit-Conservation developed by M. L. Goldschmid and P. M. Bentler (1968) was used. (SLD)

The Ypsilanti Curriculum Demonstration Project (CDP) was designed to address the question of whether some approaches to compensatory preschool education for economically disadvantaged children were more effective than others under controlled experimental conditions. The CDP examined the effects of three preschool curriculum models on children's…

In contrast to the many studies that have examined parenting in low-income families from a deficit perspective, this study examines their strengths by proposing and testing a model of parenting goals derived from social and developmental theories on goal-orientation, motivation, attachment, and child socialization. The model posits two categories…

Two studies of the effects of "Sesame Street" are presented. In the first case, the study tested two hypotheses: (1) "Sesame Street" can prepare poverty children for first grade; and (2) "Sesame Street" can narrow the achievement gap between the poor and the middle-class child. Twenty-four pairs of poverty children…

The findings and implications of doctoral research on non-urban, low income school children are summarized. Studies were the language patterns of white first graders, and the attitudes, cognitive and affective variables, and academic achievement of Negro and white fifth and sixth graders. Poverty rather than race was found to be the significant…

Reviews 36 studies of both model demonstration projects and large-scale public programs to examine the long-term effects of these programs on children from low-income families. Results show early childhood programs can produce significant short-term benefits on intelligence quotient, and important long-term benefits on school achievement, grade…

This digest discusses the findings of empirical studies on teacher-directed and child-initiated preschool programs. Three long-term preschool curriculum comparison studies--the High/Scope Preschool Curriculum Comparison, the Louisville Head Start Study, and the University of Illinois Study--were started in the 1970s. These studies indicated that…

The author documents pervasive racial disparities in the health of American children and analyzes how and how much those disparities contribute to racial gaps in school readiness. She explores a broad sample of health problems common to U.S. children, such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, asthma, and lead poisoning, as well as maternal…