Briefly describe the effects of early childhood education.

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Answers will vary. Children reared in poverty generally perform less well on standardized intelligence tests than children of higher socioeconomic status, and they are at greater risk for school failure (Robbins et al., 2012). As a result, preschool programs were begun in the 1960s to enhance their cognitive development and readiness for elementary school. Children in these programs typically are exposed to letters and words, numbers, books, exercises in drawing, pegs and pegboards, puzzles, and toy animals and dolls-materials and activities that middle-class children usually take for granted.Studies of Head Start and other intervention programs show that environmental enrichment can enhance the cognitive development of economically disadvantaged children (Bierman et al., 2014). In the Milwaukee Project, poor children of low-IQ mothers were provided with enriched day care from the age of six months. By the late preschool years, the children's IQ scores averaged about 121, compared with an average of 95 for peers who did not receive day care (Garber, 1988).