Understanding Barriers and Solutions Affecting Preschool Attendance in Low-Income Families

ABSTRACT

Preschool attendance problems negatively impact children's school readiness skills and future school attendance. Parents are critical to preschoolers’ attendance. This study explored parental barriers and solutions to preschool attendance in low-income families. School-district administrative data from a racially/ethnically diverse sample of parents with children attending the district's half-day preschool program were obtained (N = 111). Subsamples of parents participated in a phone interview and follow-up, in-person interview. Parents valued early learning and preschool. Children missed school due to illness, problems with child care, transportation, and family life. Differences in attendance rates appeared by school, family demographics, and race/ethnicity. African-Americans and Hispanics experienced more barriers than Whites and Asians, and were more likely to miss school because of illness and medical appointments. Hispanics were more likely to miss for vacation. Parents noted a lack of social connection with other parents in the school/neighborhood, making seeking help to resolve attendance barriers difficult.     

How do parents learn about adolescents' experiences? Implications for parental knowledge and adolescent risky behavior

Cluster analysis was used to identify groups defined by the patterning of fathers' and mothers' sources of knowledge about adolescents' experiences in a sample of 179 families with adolescents (M = 16.5 years). Three clusters emerged for fathers (relational, relies on spouse, relies on others) and mothers (relational, questioners, relies on others). Cluster membership was associated with socioeconomic status, work hours, personal characteristics, and parent-child relationship quality. Longitudinal path analyses revealed that knowledge sources predicted levels of knowledge, which in turn predicted risky behavior 1 year later, indirect paths that were more consistent for fathers than for mothers. Although direct associations between sources of knowledge and subsequent risky behavior were scant, when fathers relied on spouses, youth engaged in less risky behavior.     

IDEA: Identifying design principles in educational applets

The Internet is increasingly being used as a medium for educational software in the form of miniature applications (e.g., applets) to explore concepts in a domain. One such effort in mathematics education, the Educational Software Components of Tomorrow (ESCOT) project, created 42 miniature applications each consisting of a context, a set of questions, and one or more interactive applets to help students explore a mathematical concept. They were designed by experts in interface design, educational technology, and classroom teaching. However, some applications were more successful for fostering student problem-solving than others. This article describes the method used to mine a subset (25) of these applets for design principles that describe successful learner-centered design by drawing on such data as videos of students using the software and summaries of written student work. Twenty-one design principles were identified, falling into the categories of motivation, presentation, and support for problem solving. The main purpose of this article is to operationalize a method for post hoc extraction of design principles from an existing library of educational software, although readers may also find the design principles themselves to be useful. This project was funded by a seed grant from the Center for Innovative Learning Technologies funded by the National Science Foundation (REC # 9720384), and was partially supported by Educational Testing Service. Any opinions expressed in this publication are those of the authors and not necesarily of Educational Testing Service.     

Pre-service Teachers’ Perceptions of Urban Schools

This study investigates pre-service teachers’ perceptions of urban schools. We asked 41 pre-service teachers, mostly white and female, to report their perceptions of four aspects of urban schools (appearance and atmosphere, resources, students, and teachers) and identify the sources of their perceptions. We analyze the data qualitatively to understand how they perceive urban schools and quantitatively to determine group trends in their perceptions. Findings reveal that their perceptions of urban schools are complex, with negative and positive impressions of selected aspects of urban schools. Implications of these findings for teacher education, in particular, urban field placements and curriculum, are explored.

Confirmatory factor analyses comparing parental involvement frameworks with secondary students

Given the lack of research on measurement models used to operationalize parental involvement with secondary students, the goal of this research is to examine the measurement properties of the three‐domain conceptualization of parental involvement including school‐based involvement, home‐based involvement, and academic socialization, compared to a more nuanced six domain conceptualization school‐based (1) school/parent communication, (2) attending school activities, home‐based (3) home activities, (4) homework help, academic socialization, (5) parent–child communication about education, and (6) parental aspirations for child's education. When comparing the fit among the models, the six‐factor model had best fit indices and indicated varied correlations among the subdomains. The six‐factor model allowed for more nuanced variations among the subdomains that may be helpful when assessing parental involvement with high school students.     

Contextual Variation and Memory Retrieval at Six Months

In 2 experiments we asked whether training in multiple contexts could eliminate context-dependent memory retrieval at 6 months as it does for adults. We found that 24-hour retention was disrupted when infants were trained in one context and tested in another but not when they were trained in multiple contexts prior to testing in a novel context (Experiment 1). After a long delay, however, training in multiple contexts did not facilitate memory retrieval in a novel context: An otherwise effective retrieval cue (the training mobile) did not alleviate forgetting 3 weeks later when it was presented in a novel context (Experiment 2). These findings demonstrate that multiple learning contexts can override the debilitating effects of an altered context on memory retrieval at 6 months, but only over the short term. The resistance of older memories to retrieval in novel contexts after long periods of disuse may be adaptive, insuring that potentially inappropriate or irrelevant memories will not be expressed.     

Computerized and Traditional Administration of Questionnaires: Psychometric Quality and Completion Time for Measures of Self-Concept

In two independent studies of questionnaire administration, respondents completed multidimensional self-concept inventories within four randomized research conditions that mirrored the most common administration formats used in practice: paper booklets with and without answer sheets and computer questionnaires with single versus multiple items per screen. Strong differences among conditions emerged for completion time, but not for psychometric properties of scores (means, variances, reliability coefficients, concurrent validity coefficients). Answer sheets increased completion time by 24% to 34%, single-item displays by 20% to 25%, and computerization by 13% to 17%. Completion time was longer for multiple-alternative than for rating-scale items, but relative effects of answer sheets, single-item displays, and computerization remained consistent. We discuss implications for questionnaire construction and administration.     

Becoming literate in Chinese: a comparison of native‐speaking and non‐native‐speaking children

How do native Chinese‐speaking (CS) and non‐Chinese‐speaking (NCS) children learn to read and write in Chinese? In the present study, 29 CS and 34 NCS second and third graders aged 76 to 122 months (M = 93.65) participated in an experiment where they were taught 16 new Chinese characters in one of four conditions – copy, radical, phonological and look–say. Results showed that the copying condition best facilitated writing of Chinese characters for both groups, whereas radical knowledge facilitated only CS children's writing. NCS children benefited more from the phonological condition than from the look–say condition in learning to read Chinese. These results highlight the effectiveness of copying practice for all children learning to write Chinese. However, approaches to reading and writing Chinese may differ somewhat depending on the Chinese background knowledge of the children as well. Teaching children Chinese should be geared towards the strengths of different groups for learning.     

Progress report on the development of child abuse prevention, identification, and treatment systems in Eastern Europe

PROBLEM: After the Soviet Union dissolved in 1989, it became apparent that there was little recognition of the problems of child abuse and neglect, professionally, legally, or societally. There were no effective systems or laws in place to deal with these problems. METHOD: Beginning in 1995 the Children's Mental Health Alliance, in conjunction with the Open Society Institute began conducting trainings in Eastern Europe [Journal of the American Academy of Child Adolescent Psychiatry 39 (2000) 660]. Originally 18 countries from the Baltics to the Balkans participated. A program was elaborated which would proceed in several stages: (1) training mental health professionals to deal with child abuse and neglect (CAN); (2) teaching multidisciplinary team work and fostering the development of multidisciplinary NGOs focused on CAN; (3) promoting the self-sufficiency of these NGO's which would then facilitate social and legal reform and increase public awareness of the problem. Specific methods included multi-national trainings, assignment of mentors to the developing teams who maintained weekly contact with the teams and made yearly site visits to their countries, and overseeing project grants from OSI. RESULTS: NGO's had been established and registered in 11 countries, many establishing a network of programs within their countries. By 2000, over 3800 mental health professional had been trained, either directly by the program or by the trainees of the program. By the end of 2000, over 17,000 other professionals (lawyers, police, judges, educators, other physicians, etc.) had been trained by the network. CONCLUSION: While more work needs to be in this region, the teams in 11 countries have made solid starts.     

Letter names, letter sounds and phonological awareness: an examination of kindergarten children across letters and of letters across children

In this study 149 kindergarten children were assessed for knowledge of letter names and letter sounds, phonological awareness, and cognitive abilities. Through this it examined child and letter characteristics influencing the acquisition of alphabetic knowledge in a naturalistic context, the relationship between letter-sound knowledge and letter-name knowledge, and the prediction of Grade 1 phonological awareness and word identification from these variables. Knowledge of letter sounds was better for vowels and for letters with consonant–vowel names than for those with vowel–consonant names or names bearing little relationship to their sounds. However, there were anomalies within each category reflecting characteristics of the individual letters. Structural equation modelling showed that cognitive ability, comprising receptive vocabulary, non-verbal reasoning, rapid automatized naming of colours, and phonological memory significantly contributed to alphabetic knowledge and phonological awareness. In turn, letter-name knowledge but not phonological awareness predicted letter-sound knowledge and subsequent reading skill.This research was supported by a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada to the first author. Thank you is extended to the participating schools and children and to Ian Newby-Clark for his orientation to AMOS. Michelle Bell, Shelly Moretti and Jodi Page have since graduated from the University of Guelph