Part of a series on early childhood demonstration programs designed to improve early parent-child relationships, stimulate positive child development, and prevent later behavior difficulties, the pamphlet describes the Mother-Child Home Program, in which low-income mothers are educated to become more effective developmental guides for their 2 to 4…

Infants judged to be at risk for subnormal intellectual growth were randomly assigned to an experimental (N=27) or a control (N=25) group. Infants in both groups received medical care and dietary supplements; their families received social work services on a request basis. Experimental children participated in an educational day care program…

Research on the acquisition of sex roles in the United States has indicated a tendency for parents to treat girls less harshly than boys and for fathers to treat girls with more special warmth than they do boys. Eighteen children and their parents were interviewed and observed in Oslo, Norway, as part of a longitudinal study of parental influence…

This document contains six studies concerned, primarily, with the effect of maternal influences and attitudes on preschool children. The subjects were lower class Negroes, whites, and Seminole Indians. The titles of the studies and the accession numbers of the individual abstracts are as follows: (A) Maternal Influences Upon Development of…

Cognitive developmental learning is a concept expressing the hypothesis that learning has a continuing, cumulative, and transformational function in the development of intelligence. Two important questions are, "How much do we know about methods?" and "What classes of knowledge and abilities should we develop?" An analysis of past investigations,…

This document is an annual report for the academic year 1966-67 dealing with research of the Merrill-Palmer Institute conducted in conjunction with the Head Start Evaluation and Research Center of Michigan State University. Section one of the report consists of five research studies on learning and cognition: (1) Modification of Classificatory…

Twenty infants, 12 weeks of age, were subjects in an experiment to test the effects of maternal behavior on their perceptual-cognitive development. Each mother and child were observed in a controlled naturalistic setting, every 10 seconds their various behaviors were recorded, and then the mother was interviewed. During an experimental session the…

This paper describes a cross cultural study of face to face interactions between American and Gusii mothers and their infants. Observations of the Gusii people of Western Kenya suggest that the direct expression of intense affect is de-emphasized through an avoidance of direct face to face interactions. The present study investigated (1) how and…

This paper analyzes responses to questionnaires distributed to all teachers in the Alum Rock School District in the fall of 1972 and the spring of 1973. Major focus of the analysis is on the two-part question, (1) How do the experiences of teachers in voucher schools differ from the experiences of teachers in other schools? and (2) How do these…

This study of the relation of variables of home environment to differences in children's cognitive development used a sample of 25 pairs of grade five boys in the 10-12 age range matched for general intelligence but discrepant with respect to verbal ability. Home environmental measures were obtained by means of a 70 minute interview with the…

In this paper the effects of environmental influences upon the development of reading readiness in young children were discussed. It was assumed that the effects of social, cultural, and economic factors on a preschool child are mediated in a large part through adults closely involved with the child's life. One hundred sixty Negro mothers and…

In order to determine the extents to which a small rural community agreed with and had implemented the recommendations of the 1966 Anglo-American Conference on the Teaching of English (Dartmouth Seminar), five questions were formulated: (1) What is the community view of the recommendations? (2) Do differences in perception of curriculum exist…

The primary concern of this research was with community-school relations in American Indian education, particularly Navajo education. Major data on which this study was based came from interviews with 223 parents whose children attended various types of schools in Arizona during 1967-68: Nazlini (Bureau of Indian Affairs), Many Farms (BIA and…

This handbook for parents assumes that there is nothing wrong with their child but that there is something wrong with the school system. It assumes that parents know what their children need to survive and that the one-sided, professional approach to learning is not working as well as school authorities say that it is. The authors of the booklet…

AN EXPLORATION OF THE EFFECTS OF LIFE CIRCUMSTANCES (SOCIAL CLASSES), DEFINED WITH REFERENCE TO FOUR ENVIRONMENTS, ON A PERSON'S SUPPORT FOR COLLEGE EDUCATION WAS THE PURPOSE OF THE STUDY. THE FOUR ENVIRONMENTS USED WERE--(1) MAN'S SOCIAL BACKGROUND, (2) MAN'S FRIENDSHIP PATTERNS, (3) THE WORK ENVIRONMENT, AND (4) VOLUNTARY ACTIVITIES IN NONWORK…