Colorblind ideology, or the belief that one does not and should not acknowledge race, is common across fields of education. Particularly in early childhood, there is a belief that children are too young and innocent to notice race. Researchers have found, however, that by the time children reach preschool age, they are making decisions about who…

Early childhood education has become of national and local interest based upon the Preschool for All agenda. Children need to attend preschools with programs that are high quality with a curriculum that is age appropriate and prepares them for continued school success. Early childhood educators should be trained to implement the curriculum. This…

Understanding how children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) improve oral language skills in relationship to tutor prompting has not yet been investigated. The study examined how variation in language prompt use by tutors during a storybook reading intervention influences growth in vocabulary and emergent literacy for young children with ASD.…

The purpose of this study was to gather information from the Discovery Education Assessment about reading and mathematics scores for girls and boys at the kindergarten level for the years 2013-2014 and 2014-2015. Data were gathered from 276 kindergarten students attending two Title I schools in the southwest region of Tennessee. The focus was on…

This pilot study examined the effects of the Interactive Book Reading at Home (IBR; Wasik, 2009) parent training program on the emergent literacy skills of preschool children and parent beliefs about reading. A quasi-experimental, pretest and posttest design was utilized. Twenty parent-child dyads were randomly assigned to a control or treatment…

When counting, the final word used to tag the final item in a set represents the cardinality, or total number, of the set. Understanding of this concept serves as a foundation for children's basic mathematical skills, such as arithmetic. However, little is known about how variations in the early learning environment affect children's understanding…

Abstract Preschoolers' cognitive abilities were assessed each year as part of the Head Start Program requirements. The Head Start PK-4 Center evaluated preschoolers' cognition by administering the Learning Accomplishment Profile-Diagnostic (LAP-D), as a pretest and posttest measure. The LAP-D study used archival data collected from the 2009-2010…

The purpose of this study was to examine children's musical and mathematical behaviors as they participated in an interdisciplinary pre-K curriculum. Research questions were: 1. What connections--if any--do young children make between music learning and mathematics learning? 2. Is there a relationship between young children's emergent rhythm…

Young children must develop basic concepts of numeracy--one being that numbers have magnitudes that increase linearly--before they are able to succeed in mathematics. Children from low-income families have been found to be at a greater disadvantage in the development of numeracy, but this disadvantage can be overcome through the use of a simple…

The Read Aloud strategy is uniquely suitable for the preschool classroom. On the peripheral, the Read Aloud is a natural, relaxed activity. With the increase of accountability and assessments in formal education (Meier, 2003), it has become more crucial for educators to prevent interruptions in the acquisition of emergent skills by preschoolers.…

This quasi-experimental study examined the effect of a phonological awareness professional development program on teachers' phonological awareness knowledge, the impact phonological awareness knowledge had on the frequency and complexity of phonological awareness instruction, and the impact the instruction had on students' phonological awareness.…

This program evaluation focused on one year of Bridges to Tomorrow, a multi-year initiative designed by Metro United Way to better prepare at-risk children for academic success upon entering kindergarten. Bridges to Tomorrow provided three child care centers operating in at-risk neighborhoods with interventions that included a structured…

This study examined the additive benefit of parent dialogic reading techniques in older, high-risk preschool children using multiple baseline design across participants, a single subject research design, as was as well as pre-test and post-test measures. Five preschoolers age-eligible to begin kindergarten the following school year participated.…

I tested the effects of inducing the preverbal foundational developmental cusp for the capacity for sameness on the rate of learning for curriculum goals with 6 preschool aged children diagnosed on the autism spectrum. Prior to and following the implementation of the sensory matching procedure, participants were presented with learn unit…

Many children who have attended Georgia's prekindergarten programs are unprepared to enter kindergarten and learn a standards-based mathematics curriculum. In addition, a majority of prekindergarten programs in Georgia struggle to provide high quality mathematics instructional support for children. One such program is a childcare center located in…