This study leverages naturally occurring lotteries for oversubscribed Boston Public Schools prekindergarten program sites between 2007 and 2011, for 3,182 children (M = 4.5 years old) to estimate the impacts of winning a first choice lottery and enrolling in Boston prekindergarten versus losing a first choice lottery and not enrolling on children’s enrollment and persistence in district schools, grade retention, special education placement, and third‐grade test scores. There are large effects on enrollment and persistence, but no effects on other examined outcomes for this subsample. Importantly, children who competed for oversubscribed seats were not representative of all appliers and almost all control‐group children attended center‐based preschool. Findings contribute to the larger evidence base and raise important considerations for future prekindergarten lottery‐based studies.
Family literacy programmes can take many shapes, and are often focused on training adult caregivers to engage in particular literacy activities with their young children. In this study, through a series of five, two-hour workshops, we instead worked to help families take advantage of opportunities to infuse literacy learning into their daily routines with their preschool-aged children. Effects of the workshop include parent reports of increased literacy interactions in the home, particularly in the areas of read-alouds and writing opportunities. In addition, students whose families participated in the workshops showed statistically significantly greater literacy growth in print and word awareness and comprehension than peers whose families did not participate in the workshops.
In this study, we investigated the impact of past and current service-learning on the civic attitudes of African American college women: 44 students enrolled in either service-learning or non–service-learning courses were given pretests and posttests measuring civic attitudes. Repeated measures analyses of variance were conducted to examine the effect of previous and current service-learning experiences on 6 different aspects of civic attitudes. Results did not indicate changes in civic attitudes over time for service-learning students. However, there was a significant interaction between past and current service-learning in predicting political awareness. Implications of the findings are discussed.
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