This study examined whether scripts provide a basis for the categories preschool children use to structure their semantic memories and whether the use of taxonomies to structure memory becomes more common only after children enter elementary school. Subjects were 108 children in three equal groups of 18 boys and 18 girls children each of 4-, 5-,…

This guide for infant day care providers examines the importance of early experience for brain development and strategies for providing optimal infant care. The introduction discusses the current devaluation of day care and idealization of maternal care and identifies benefits of quality day care experience for intellectual development, sleep…

SHAPES--an acronym for the South Plains Child Care Management Services (SpCCMS) Helping, Assisting and Preparing Educators and Staff--is also the name of a preschool readiness curriculum that is being developed for use by administrators and teachers. The first phase of the curriculum development consists of the publication of five books to be used…

The Early Screening Inventory-Revised (ESI-R) is a brief developmental screening instrument that is individually administered to children from 3 to 6 years of age. It is designed to identify children who may need special education services in order to perform successfully in school. The ESI-R is intended to assess the child's ability to acquire…

Noting that young children's initial writing efforts are often dismissed as insignificant scribbling, a study explored children's emerging understandings about written language as indicated by the changes in 47 preschool children's autographs. Throughout a school year children were asked to write their names and draw pictures of themselves.…

The paper describes the development of the "Test of Thought and Language" (Total) which is intended to allow first grade teachers to determine if students are ready for phonics instruction or if, for some students, the curriculum should first develop language concepts, structures and thinking processes. Background information for the…

Project CHIME (Children with Hearing Impairments in Mainstreamed Environments) was developed to create a curriculum for use by professionals who are providing mainstreaming opportunities for hearing-impaired preschoolers. The CHIME curriculum is divided into five activity areas that are part of the growth and development process for all…

A nationwide survey was conducted to determine what skills and knowledge kindergarten teachers consider important for preschoolers to have upon entering kindergarten. A sample of 400 randomly selected school districts were invited to contribute kindergarten readiness guidelines and report cards; 78 schools and school districts from the United…

Begun in December, 1988, the Michigan Early Childhood Education Preschool (MECEP) program for high-risk 4-year-old children was serving 136 pupils by February, 1989. A process evaluation focused on cognitive, psychomotor, parent participation, education, and language development objectives and on the scheduling of class activities. The evaluation…

Project Word-Back, an exploratory followup study of 21 young deaf-blind (Rubella) children (6 to 9 years old), was conducted to establish a tentative reference source of information, obtain teacher estimates on selected aspects of the current functioning level of a sample of children, and provide basic data from which hypotheses may be formulated…

The current state of and opportunities for basic research related to child and adolescent development are described in this report. The document was prepared as a resource for developing the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development's 5-year plan of research for the years 1983-1987. Five broad areas of research are addressed: (1)…

The document contains 10 papers from the 1973 John Tracy Clinic (Los Angeles, California) Summer Session for teachers on communication skills for deaf/blind children. J. Efron, the author of "Teaching Communication Skills to Deaf/Blind Children--Which Method?" examines advantages and disadvantages of several methods of teaching communication…

The study was designed to demonstrate the effectiveness of diagnostic teaching with 70 children (6 to 14 years old) with learning and behavioral disorders and to investigate the administrative plan which is most efficient and effective for implementing diagnostic teaching. Ss were divided into three experimental groups--Experimental Group I with…

This paper reports on two aspects of dyadic communication skills: verbal imitation, and response to questions and commands, as they relate to the development of semantic functions in three English-speaking children. The children, aged 16, 21 and 22 months, were unobtrusively videotaped during weekly free play sessions with their mothers. The…

Two major strategies for linguistically encoding an idea or proposition are suggested. The first strategy involves encoding an idea in the space of a single utterance, while the second strategy conveys the proposition through a sequence of two or more utterances. The tendency has been to focus on discourse as a composite of sentences (the first…