The HighScope Educational Research Foundation (known as HighScope or High/Scope) studies methods of early childhood education based on the methods of the 1962 Perry Preschool study. [1] It was founded in 1970 by psychologist David Weikart.
The Perry Preschool study has been noted for its "large effects on educational attainment, income, criminal activity, and other important life outcomes, sustained well into adulthood". [2] [3]
The philosophy behind HighScope is based on child development theory and research, originally drawing on the work of Jean Piaget and John Dewey. [4] The curriculum was further developed to incorporate Lev Vygotsky's zone of proximal development and Jerome Bruner's related strategy of adult scaffolding. This method emphasizes the role of adults to support each child at their current developmental level and help them build upon it under a model of "shared control," where activities are both child-initiated and adult-guided. [5] [6] The adults working with the children see themselves more as facilitators or partners, rather than as managers or supervisors.
The original study was conducted from 1962-1967 in Ypsilanti, Michigan under the guidance of psychologist David Weikart and Perry Elementary School principal Charles Eugene Beatty. [1] [7] It was intended to boost the cognitive skills of 123 disadvantaged African American children with low IQs. [3] [8]
Families were randomly assigned to one of two groups: the intervention and a control group. For 2 years during the regular school year (39 weeks a year), 3-4 year old children would come to a classroom for 2 and a half hours a day. Students worked on projects where "they planned tasks, they executed tasks, and then they reviewed the tasks collectively." [3] The intervention also included weekly visits by the teachers to the homes of the children for about 1.5 hours per visit to improve parent-child interactions at home. [9]
By the time children were 10, there wasn't much of a difference in how children in the two groups performed on tests of cognitive ability.
Because the study was conducted in the 1960s, researchers have been able to follow the children who went through the Perry Preschool Program through adulthood. Economist and Nobel laureate James Heckman has found that adults from the treatment group were "much more likely to graduate high school, much more likely to make earnings, much more likely to go on to college, much less likely to commit crime." [3] At age 19, 67% of the preschool group graduated high school, compared to only 49% of the control group. 59% of the preschool group was employed, and 32% of the control group. Within the preschool group, 38% went to pursued higher education, while only 21% of the control group did. There was a 20 percentage point difference between the two groups in regards to having ever been detained or arrested (31% for the preschool group, 51% for the control). [10]
Heckman also found multigenerational benefits of the program: children of participants in the program appear to have benefitted. According to Heckman, "We find some very strong effects. The children of the participants are healthier. The children of the participants are also earning more. They have better social and emotional skills, are more likely to graduate high school and go on to college, less likely to engage in the criminal justice system, so they're less likely to be incarcerated or even have ever been arrested." [3]
Heckman finds that the work with the parents was an important distinguishing component of the program, particularly because the parents stay in the children's lives beyond the program's 2-year duration. He also finds that the quality of the teachers (and consequently the expense of the program) was a critical component that allowed it to succeed in comparison with other, less expensive interventions. [3]
Due to the results, the organization Social Projects that Work finds the study as a strong candidate for further research, but warns that the study was relatively small (128 subjects; 123 after dropouts). [2]
James Heckman estimates that the Perry Project saved society $7 to $12 for every $1 invested, mostly due to reduced crime. [11] [12] HighScope itself reports that for every tax dollar invested in the early care and education program, $7 are saved for taxpayers by the time the participant is 27 years old, $13 are saved for tax payers by the time the participant is 40 years old, and that there is a $16 total return including increased income to the participants. [13] [14] See also Heckman, Moon, Pinto, Savelyev, & Yavitz (2010a, b). [15] [16]
Head Start is a program of the United States Department of Health and Human Services that provides comprehensive early childhood education, health, nutrition, and parent involvement services to low-income children and families. The program's services and resources are designed to foster stable family relationships, enhance children's physical and emotional well-being, and establish an environment to develop strong cognitive skills. The transition from preschool to elementary school imposes diverse developmental challenges that include requiring the children to engage successfully with their peers outside the family network, adjust to the space of a classroom, and meet the expectations the school setting provides.
A preschool, also known as nursery school, pre-primary school, or play school or creche, is an educational establishment or learning space offering early childhood education to children before they begin compulsory education at primary school. It may be publicly or privately operated, and may be subsidized from public funds.
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Pre-kindergarten is a voluntary classroom-based preschool program for children below the age of five in the United States, Canada, Turkey and Greece. It may be delivered through a preschool or within a reception year in elementary school. Pre-kindergartens play an important role in early childhood education. They have existed in the US since 1922, normally run by private organizations. The U.S. Head Start program, the country's first federally funded pre-kindergarten program, was founded in 1967. This attempts to prepare children to succeed in school.
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David P. Weikart was an American psychologist and founder of the HighScope Curriculum, an early childhood education program.
Universal preschool is an international movement supporting the use of public funding to provide preschool education to all families. This movement is focused on promoting a global, rather than local, preschool program. The goal is to provide equity across all socioeconomic backgrounds, enabling children to improve their academic and social skills before they attend kindergarten. Universal preschool, funded by the public, would allow more families to send their children to preschool.
The Carolina Abecedarian Project was a controlled experiment that was conducted in 1972 in North Carolina, United States, by the Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute to study the potential benefits of early childhood education for poor children to enhance school readiness. It has been found that in their earliest school years, poor children lag behind others, suggesting they were ill-prepared for schooling. The Abecedarian project was inspired by the fact that few other early childhood programs could provide a sufficiently well-controlled environment to determine the effectiveness of early childhood training.
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Compensatory education offers supplementary programs or services designed to help children at risk of cognitive impairment and low educational achievement succeed.
Education economics or the economics of education is the study of economic issues relating to education, including the demand for education, the financing and provision of education, and the comparative efficiency of various educational programs and policies. From early works on the relationship between schooling and labor market outcomes for individuals, the field of the economics of education has grown rapidly to cover virtually all areas with linkages to education.
Learning through play is a term used in education and psychology to describe how a child can learn to make sense of the world around them. Through play children can develop social and cognitive skills, mature emotionally, and gain the self-confidence required to engage in new experiences and environments.
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A social experiment is a type of psychological or sociological research for testing people's reactions to certain situations or events. The experiment depends on a particular social approach where the main source of information is the point of view and knowledge of the participants of the experiment. To carry out a social experiment, specialists usually split participants into two groups — active participants and respondents. Throughout the experiment, participants are monitored by specialists to identify the effects and differences as a result of the experiment. Intentional communities are generally considered as social experiments.
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W. Steven Barnett is a U.S. American education economist who currently serves as a Board of Governors Professor at Rutgers University, where - being one of its founders - he also directs the National Institute for Early Education Research (NIEER). He is one of the world's leading scholars on early child development and the economics of pre-schools.
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