Impacts of a Comprehensive School Readiness Curriculum for Preschool Children at Risk for Educational Difficulties

Abstract

This article reports findings from a cluster-randomized study of an integrated literacy- and math-focused preschool curriculum, comparing versions with and without an explicit socioemotional lesson component to a business-as-usual condition. Participants included 110 classroom teachers from randomized classrooms and approximately eight students from each classroom (N = 760) who averaged 4.48 (SD = 0.44) years of age at the start of the school year. There were positive impacts of the two versions of the curriculum on language, phonological awareness, math, and socioemotional outcomes, but there were no added benefits to academic or socioemotional outcomes for the children receiving explicit socioemotional instruction. Results are discussed with relevance to early childhood theory, policy, and goals of closing the school readiness gap.

Do Curriculum-Based Social and Emotional Learning Programs in Early Childhood Education and Care Strengthen Teacher Outcomes? A Systematic Literature Review

“…Ten studies were described as randomised or cluster-randomised controlled trials [36,[38][39][40][41][42][43][44][45][46][47] and four quasi-experimental trials [48][49][50][51]. Settings included kindergarten [40,41,47], childcare [43,46], preschool [38,39,44,45,[48][49][50], Head Start preschool or kindergarten (early childhood education services provided to low-income children and families in the United States) [35,42,44,45,47,51] and early school grades [40,44,47]. In most studies, control group children participated in a business-as-usual ECEC curriculum [n = 13,35,38,39,41,43,[44][45][46][47][48][49]...…”

Reciprocal Effects of Self‐Regulation, Semantic Knowledge, and Reading Comprehension in Early Elementary School

“…These include the linguistic component to many tasks, particularly working memory (Booth, Boyle, & Kelly, ; MacDonald & Christiansen, ), the role that self‐directed inner speech (a linguistic process) may play in cognitive regulation (Barkley, ; Cragg & Nation, ). Some conjecture that students with stronger behavioral and attentional self‐regulatory skills are better able to engage with instruction within classrooms and thus precipitate both improved academic skills and improved SR because of the opportunity to practice SR during instructional episodes (e.g., to stay focused and attentive during small‐group instruction; Blair & Diamond, ; Lonigan et al., ). One possibility raised by Fuhs et al.…”

“…These include the linguistic component to many tasks, particularly working memory (Booth, Boyle, & Kelly, 2010;MacDonald & Christiansen, 2002), the role that self-directed inner speech (a linguistic process) may play in cognitive regulation (Barkley, 1997;Cragg & Nation, 2010). Some conjecture that students with stronger behavioral and attentional self-regulatory skills are better able to engage with instruction within classrooms and thus precipitate both improved academic skills and improved SR because of the opportunity to practice SR during instructional episodes (e.g., to stay focused and attentive during small-group instruction; Blair & Diamond, 2008;Lonigan et al, 2015). One possibility raised by Fuhs et al (2014) is that executive functioning and SR may be particularly important for skills that require substantial attention, cognitive processing, including metacognition (Efklides & Misailidi, 2010), and RC, more so than for already mastered skills (such as naming alphabet letters would be for most firstand second-grade students).…”

Children’s quantification with <i>every</i> over time

“…Participants were recruited as part of a study by the School Readiness Research Consortium (Landry 2009(Landry , 2014Lonigan 2015). The majority of the children came from low-income families and were eligible for free school lunches.…”