The Vygotskian preschool education program (VPEP) is built around mediation in the context of preschool age-specific activities such as sociodramatic play, constructive play, listening and retelling fairy tales, playing with dollhouses, motor activities, and some others. We used the VPEP as part of the daily curriculum in two pre-K classes at PS…

We compared the performance of 3- and 5-year-old children with that of chimpanzees in two tasks requiring collaboration via complementary roles. In both tasks, children and chimpanzees were able to coordinate two complementary roles with peers and solve the problem cooperatively. This is the first experimental demonstration of the coordination of…

In an early education program, 100 disadvantaged 4-year-olds (50 Negroes and 50 whites) attend classes one-half day, four days a week, from October through June. A teacher visits each child's home every other week to conduct a tutorial session lasting 1 1/2 hours. Three objectives of the program are (1) to develop a preschool curriculum based on…

This study attempted to develop, implement, and evaluate an experimental preschool education program based on Piaget's theory of cognitive development. A further goal was to examine Piaget's theoretical assumptions and postulated cognitive developmental trends for a 2-year period of the preoperational substage. A total of 48 3- to 5-year-olds…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effectiveness of CEMREL's Language and Thinking: New Directions Program, a broadly based early learning program in the teaching of basic language and reasoning skills. The program is a hierarchical skills oriented approach which provides a broadly based set of guidelines for teachers; a wide array…

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…

Two curricula, Englemann-Becker and New Nursery School, were analyzed for effectiveness with Head Start children over a period of eight months, using the Slosson and Merrill-Palmer tests, a socialization scale and classroom observations. In congnitive development, there are no significant differences between the two curricula as used by teachers…

A comparative evaluation of the effectiveness of center-based, home-based and parent-based delivery systems for preschool intervention services was undertaken. Over a 5-year period, the Pennsylvania Research in Infant Development and Education Project enrolled more than 170 disadvantaged children in its two principal component programs: the…

The relationship between Piagetian theory and its application in three early childhood programs is discussed in two papers with differing points of view. The first paper discusses Piaget's epistemology and presents a critical analysis of the three programs, concluding that only one of them is consistent with Piaget's epistemology. A rejoinder,…

This report presents a description and evaluation of the Cognitively Oriented Urban Prekindergarten Program in West Chester, Pennsylvania, a preschool program for children from low income families and/or one-parent families. The program was designed to form a link between the Early Learning Program of the PRIDE Project and public kindergarten.…

The two basic objectives of this five-year study were to investigate a number of variables related to the preparation of effective instructional materials for disadvantaged preschool children, and to determine whether special language instruction would produce improvement in language abilities and thus promote academic progress in the beginning…