The favorable results of the minimal stimulation program here described have important implications for all who provide health services for underprivileged preschool children. The authors indicate that this project is the first which coordinates compensatory infant education with complete health care, with the prime educator being a public health nurse.T&dquo; many inner city children do poorly I 'HAT many inner cit children do poorly in our public school systems is undisputed. As a group they show IQ scores 10 to 20 points below middle class children,, and have more behavior disturbances and personality dysfunctions in school. 2. One of the earliest and broadest attempts at enrichment, the Head Start program, seems to have established two far-reaching principles: (I) three years of age is much too late to begin intervention,~ (2) unless the educational program includes the parents the results will be meager and reversible .4As a direct result of the deficiencies revealed through the Head Start experience, 36 Parent and Child Centers were started in 1967 with programs directed toward improving the physical and emotional health and cognitive development of children from birth to 3 years of age.&dquo; The Centers, administered by the Office of Economic Opportunity, may encompass both homebased stimulation efforts and day care programs. These long-term and expensive studies are being evaluated, but statistical data will not be available for some time. The same may be said for the handful of experimental infant day care programs which began to develop about 1965, fostered by the interest of the staff of the National Institute of Mental Health. These are concentrating on preventing culturally determined mental retardation.6, The results thus far appear very favorable. The figures from many group infant care programs 8 which are primarily for service will also be evaluated in due course. Other research programs in early education are concerned for the most part with children two years of age or older.9 9 Developmental Studies with Infants If we confine our citations to those of investigators whose subjects are under one year of age, we find five-with work still in progress -which have published some results.

Extensive child health supervision, with emphasis on counseling and anticipatory guidance, was provided for the first three years of life to an experimental series of 47 normal first-born black infants from low-income families living in the environs of Children's Hospital in Washington, D.C. The mothers were unmarried schoolgirls in normal physical and mental health. A control series consisted of 48 similar mother-child dyads from the same area. Data were collected, in part by an outside evaluator, at yearly intervals on both experimental and control series in a form suitable for coding on computer cards. Comparison of differences in behavioral results between the two series showed statistically significant findings in favor of the experimental children, as well as numerous favorable trends during the first six years of life. Positive effects became evident in diet and eating habits, in some developmental problems of growing up (such as toilet training), and in certain abstract qualities including self-confidence. Significant differences were also noted between the experimental and control mothers for various child rearing practices and personality characteristics. No significant difference or trend favored the control series. We believe that a causal relationship existed between the intervention amid at least some of the significant findings.

While preparing for its 1999 study, Giving and Volunteering in the United States , Independent Sector was told by its contractor that starting in 2000, it could no longer conduct the survey using in-home interviews. Independent Sector contracted with another company to do a parallel study in 1999 by telephone to identify issues related to changing the survey mode. The results showed highly statistically significant differences on many of the major questions, raising questions as to whether the differences were mainly due to between-company or between-collection modalities. Another company was then commissioned to do both an in-home study and a telephone study in two cities in New England. With similar training for all interviewers, better sampling methods, prior letters to potential respondents, incentives, and multiple follow-ups, the results showed no significant differences between modes on any of the major questions.

Visually evoked potentials (VEP) elicited by a flashing light were recorded from 64 white 12-yearold girls whose IQ scores were uniformly distributed across the range found in a normal school population. The objective was to examine the correlations between intelligence, as measured on standard IQ tests, and characteristics of the YEP. Two questions were studied: whether such correlations are caused mainly by low IQ subjects rather than by differences which extend across the whole IQ range, and the usefulness of frequency analysis in analyzing the data. Recording was bipolar from the right parietal area of the head. The results were that the low IQ subjects had larger low-frequency « 12 Hz) amplitudes than the high IQ subjects, and high IQ subjects had larger high-frequency (> 30 Hz) components than the low IQ subjects. Correlations of low-frequency spectral amplitude with IQ were caused by differences between only the lowest IQ group (lQ less than 90) and all other subjects; these correlations were approximately the same from the first to the last of four runs. Correlations of high-frequency components with IQ were due to differences between both the low IQ and average subjects and the high IQ and average subjects. These correlations decreased between the first and the fourth run. The differences in the properties of the correlation coefficients in the two frequency ranges suggest that there may be two effects causing the differences in the VEPs. These differences are seen in two distinct frequency ranges.