Research: 3-month break plays major role in achievement gap

With summer vacations over or winding down, education experts say teachers will spend the first four to six weeks of the new school year simply rehashing material that their young charges learned in the previous school year but forgot over the summer.

It’s a phenomenon so well-recognized that it even has a name: the summer slide.

“Research confirms what most people accept as common sense, which is that if you don’t practice something, you suffer a loss,” said Ron Fairchild, executive director of the Center for Summer Learning at Johns Hopkins University.

Studies have found that students in all income groups fall an average of 2.6 months behind in math skills, possibly because few students are likely to practice much outside the classroom.

But when it comes to the summer slide in reading, household income is an important factor. Children in low-income households lose an average of two months in reading ability, while their middle- and upper-income counterparts tend to make slight gains in reading levels over the summer months.

Researchers attribute that difference in part to greater opportunities for children in more affluent households to participate in costly summer programs such as specialized camps, or to go with parents on educational vacations that keep their minds stimulated.

And new research is showing that the summer slide is more than just a temporary nuisance. In a study released earlier this year, sociologists at Johns Hopkins concluded that the summer learning gap between well-off and poor students that starts in elementary school has a powerful influence on reading scores through high school and beyond…

Source: Chicago Tribune, United States
http://tinyurl.com/37q4fn

Standards of the Three Rs in infant schools have slumped to their lowest level for seven years, national test results reveal.

Seven-year-olds’ mastery of reading, writing and maths has returned to 2000 levels despite huge state spending on early education schemes…

Almost half of boys - nearly 140,000 - will start the next phase of primary school next week without the writing skills needed to be sure of coping with the courses…

The figures emerged days after research from Durham University found that spending of £21billion over the past decade on nursery education and childcare has failed to improve children’s ability to learn.

Experts also voiced concern that the infiltration of screen entertainment in the lives of the youngest children - including TVs, DVDs and computer games - was contributing to poor language skills.

Ministers, however, are optimistic that results will rally after the introduction of the traditional “synthetic phonics” system of teaching reading.

It was not made compulsory in schools until last September despite evidence that it can virtually wipe out illiteracy.

In maths, youngsters will learn their times tables at age eight, a year earlier than now.

There will also be a greater focus on mental arithmetic, with pupils expected to work out more answers using pencil and paper alone…

Tory schools spokesman Nick Gibb said: “Ministers are worryingly complacent about these figures.

“Until we get literacy and maths to significantly higher levels in the first two years of school, we will continue to have problems later on in the education system.

“This is hugely concerning as these early years of school are critical building blocks for a child’s education.” …

Source: This is London, UK
http://tinyurl.com/33kmd8

As a geneticist, Jane Gitschier, PhD, is interested in teasing out the relative contributions of genes and environment on behavior. For more than a decade, she and former UCSF colleague Nelson Freimer, PhD, now at UCLA, have been exploring this question by studying the capacity that some people have for “perfect pitch,” the ability to instantly and precisely identify a musical note.

In 1998, the UCSF team reported results of a survey study of 612 professional and student musicians nationwide in the American Journal for Human Genetics. In that study, the researchers reported that 40 percent of those who began formal musical training by age four reported developing perfect pitch. In contrast, only four percent of those who began training after age nine did. The decline in between was remarkably steady.

Two years later, the researchers found that musicians with perfect pitch were four times more likely to report a family member with perfect pitch than those without it. Forty eight percent of those with perfect pitch said they had a first degree relative with the skill, while only 14 percent of those without perfect pitch did…

Source: UCSF Today, CA
http://pub.ucsf.edu/today/cache/feature/200708291.html

The programs - one in Covington and one in Hamilton County - put mental health professionals in preschool classrooms as observers and consultants, helping teachers build social and emotional strengths for children. They can also provide more focused attention and sometimes therapy for children dealing with serious emotional and behavior problems…

“We’re helping children develop the social and emotional skills they will need in kindergarten and through school and beyond,” said Starkey. “We’re catching them during a really important window of opportunity.”

The two Resilience programs literally will change the future, said Starkey.

“A good start in kindergarten can affect everything that follows,” she said. “If you intervene and give a child the support and therapy and resources they need, you can remediate problems. If a child has social/emotional problems, it doesn’t get better, it keeps getting worse.”

Children who are not ready to learn fall behind and can get trapped in a spiral of academic failures and behavior problems that can lead to crime, poverty, teen pregnancy and lifelong problems with jobs and relationships…

Source: Cincinnati Post, OH
http://tinyurl.com/3d4bbr

In the foreword to her new book “Your Child . . . Your Way” Dr Tanya Byron says something rather unexpected. The parenting industry, she declares, is marketing a “simplified and unrealistic view of parenting”. The raft of books and television programmes that has sprouted from the modern preoccupation with the “right” way to rear a child is not helping but increasingly disempowering parents. They are becoming overwhelmed and confused by a burgeoning industry that is presenting the most instinctive human function — raising one’s offspring — as a combination of easy tips and techniques to be learnt like a five times table. The genre, she seems to be saying, is a monster spinning out of control…

… You don’t have to be a psychologist to feel queasy at some of the stuff we now see on television. Dr Byron may be too diplomatic to identify specific programmes but I am not. One that stood out as particularly distasteful was I Smack and I’m Proud, an ITV production in which parents boasted of their iron discipline by hitting their children in front of the camera. If this kind of thing is now a part of the genre then I can see why she wants no part of it. In any case her message seems to be that parents should trust their own instincts more and not rely on one-size-fits-all rules from a parenting manual that might not suit their own individual child.

Which brings us to Dr Byron’s new book. At a time when neurotic, competitive parents are increasingly hung up on strict bedtime routines, potty training, eating and myriad other aspects of toddlers’ “ideal” behaviour, reading it is a blessed relief…

Here’s an example. She wonders why some parents are so preoccupied with pushing their children into potty training perhaps before they are ready. “Early bladder and bowel training is not an indication of a future place at Oxford University,” she writes, and “How many 15-year-olds do you see in nappies?”

Ditto parents who are overly anxious about their child’s eating. Put yourself in their shoes, she says, and next time you’re having a meal, get a friend to peer into your face, repeatedly mop it with a fragranced wipe and see how you like it. Most pleasing to me as a passionate dissenter of Gina Ford’s methods is her declaration, both as a mother and a child psychologist, that she isn’t comfortable with rigid routines for newborn babies. You should feel able to lift them when they cry at night and fall asleep on your chest, says Dr Byron. You need to get to know each other, to establish a bond before setting precise routines. “The young baby should not be viewed as a task but as a new, precious and bewildered little human being,” she writes.

The first half of the book is a more practical guide with advice, for example, on how to deal with tantrums, how to gradually introduce bedtime routines, sensible toilet training and encouraging small children to eat. But it differs from traditional parenting books in that its standpoint is showing the parent how to really make it work, effectively “combining thinking and emotion”…

“You can buy every book on the planet but if you don’t believe you’re a good parent and don’t believe your child is capable of being a lovely child … none of it will work.” …

Source: The Sunday Times, UK
http://tinyurl.com/2waebw

Daycare Trust today urged caution following media claims, in response to a Durham University research study, that the Government’s early years investment was failing to improve children’s educational outcomes at school. The national childcare charity pointed to longer-term studies of children which show clear benefits from high-quality nursery education.

“The Durham research may point to continuing problems in ensuring that poorer children get the early years care and education they’re entitled to, rather than to a failure of early years education to deliver educational benefits,” says Policy and Research Manager Maxine Hill…

“It is absolutely clear that there are positive cognitive outcomes for children who attend early years education, which increase depending on the length of time in months and years spent in these settings. As disadvantaged children already lag behind their middle-class contemporaries in terms of cognitive development at the age of three, the provision of high quality early years education is one very important way to counter this.”

The Durham research is a snapshot of children at a particular point in their development, and the author cautions that it may be too soon to see the benefits of recent investment and changes in policy…

… Evidence from Scandinavian countries shows that early years education is vital in breaking the cycle of inequality between children:

“The combination of good parental leave and early childhood education and care are key factors in explaining why countries like Sweden and Denmark have broken the link between parental income and a child’s future outcomes,” says Maxine Hill…

Source: Politics.co.uk, UK
http://tinyurl.com/2v6vp6

The government’s efforts to improve early-years education have not had a significant effect on children starting primary school, research has found.

Academics at Durham University looked at the impact of the government’s various pre-school initiatives on school starters, using performance indicators in primary schools (PIP).

Researchers at the university’s Curriculum, Evaluation and Management Centre looked at the cognitive abilities of five-year-olds as they entered school between 2001 and 2006.

They found little tangible evidence that the measures, ranging from Sure Start to the Children’s Act, had improved the development and skills of young children.

Researcher Dr Christine Merrell said: “One would have expected that the major government programmes would have resulted in some measurable changes in our sample of almost 35,000 children.

“It is possible, however, that it is just still too early to measure the effects of these programmes, particularly those of the Children’s Act and Every Child Matters, which were only introduced in the past few years.”

The government maintains early years education is having an effect, as is reinforced by other studies…

Source: Politics.co.uk, UK
http://tinyurl.com/3atg29

… The skills that have become most valuable over time seem to be general skills that come with higher levels of education — as opposed to the very specific skills gained through experience in a particular job or occupation. This is an important distinction. It means that more than ever, the path to economic success lies in education rather than in on-the-job experience. And if these general skills are the key to success, it follows that a lack of skills presents a formidable barrier to success — for an individual, a community, a state or a nation.

What does this have to do with early childhood? I mentioned that acquiring skills improves one’s ability to acquire further skills. Could this logic extend back to the earliest investments in human capital — those that occur between birth and age 5? I believe the evidence indicates that the answer is yes.

Economists like to think about investment in terms of rate of return, and there is reason to think that the rate of return on early childhood investment could be particularly high. Like any investment in human capital, some of the return accrues directly to the individual in increased lifetime earning ability. But a substantial share of the return — perhaps as much as three-quarters of the total — is a broader, social benefit coming from such sources as reduced costs of remediation and other special services in primary and secondary school, as well as from the reduced incidence of the array of social problems often associated with low educational achievement.

There are many explanations for the apparent high economic returns to early childhood education, but a key difference between early childhood investments and investments at primary and secondary education levels is the potential for compounding. That is, enhancing early childhood development appears to improve a child’s ability to learn at later stages. This means the return on early education comes not just from the direct effects, say on the development of cognitive ability, but also from the fact that these early investments increase the productivity of later educational investments. Nobel Prize-winning economist James J. Heckman has emphasized this point in his writing on early childhood education…

Source: Washington Post, United States
http://tinyurl.com/3dwk4t

So the question is: when exactly did every father figure portrayed in family comedies turn into a meandering, useless, half-witted putz?

Now, I don’t intend for this to be an assault on women in any way. Clearly, there is still a rather gaping disparity when it comes to decent female roles in movies, and sexism against women definitely endures in all forms of entertainment. But if we’ve learned anything from years of gender studies, it is that images in the mass media have a significant influence on how we view women. So, what about the dudes? …

Misandry is the sexist counterpart to misogyny and it has only recently been recognized as a serious cultural problem. Basically, it refers to the theory that men are becoming defined by a set of negative stereotypes in the media, whether it be in the form of dehumanizing or demonizing men, or just turning them all into dim-witted daddies. Sound familiar?

In their book, Spreading Misandry: The Teaching of Contempt for Men in Popular Culture, authors Paul Nathanson and Katherine Young argue that misandry in all forms is largely tolerated in our society. In fact, in the movies, sexism in the form of misandry is considered “politically correct,” they write, creating a double standard among the genders.

Dumb daddies may send a subtle message of misandry, but it is still pervasive. Because even though we’re dealing with entertainment, young people surely take their cues from the big screen and TV…

And that is the real issue here. If kids today are only seeing images of fathers haplessly falling down stairs, unable to work simple small appliances or just pathetically submitting themselves to being the target of some little kid’s upchuck, how are they going to respect the job when they grow up?

Source: Toronto Star, Canada
http://www.thestar.com/comment/article/250101

One may wonder why there are so many children without the necessary skills that are critical to school achievement. Any early childhood teacher will tell you that one contributing factor is the child’s experience with books…

Early childhood researchers indicate and teachers confirm that shared book experiences provide children with skills essential to school readiness.

These skills include vocabulary development, sound structure, meaning of print, story and language structure, sustained attention, the love of reading, and more.

Just as young children need food, shelter and love, they also need the nourishment of books. Preschoolers need to be read to daily. On average, children who are read to three or more times per week perform better in school than those who are read to fewer than three times per week.

Equally important, is how to read to preschoolers. When most adults share a book with a preschooler, the adult reads and the child listens.

Research points to a better way to share books. The adult should help the child become the teller of story and the adult should become the listener, the questioner and the audience for the child. Children learn best from active involvement with the book. No one can learn to play a sport just by watching someone else play. Similarly, no one can learn to read just by listening to someone else read. Active participation is the key.

Adults reading to preschoolers should carry on a dialogue with the child by asking “what” questions, asking questions that can not be answered with a yes or no, and expanding upon what the child says. These techniques will teach vocabulary and encourage the child to tell more complete descriptions of what they see in the pictures…

Simply stated, this type of shared book experience is the parent and child having a conversation or dialogue about the picture book. Children will enjoy dialogic reading more than traditional reading as long as parents vary what they do from reading to reading, learn to mix-up questions with traditional reading, and follow the interests of their child…

Source: Muskogee Daily Phoenix, OK
http://tinyurl.com/39o69z