Empowering Families was focused on infusing the Providence Public School District (PPSD) elementary schools with an intervention centered on the Mind in the Making (MITM) training, designed to build the capacity of families, teachers, and schools to understand how children's executive function impacts social-emotional and cognitive growth. Data…

Child care is increasingly viewed as an opportunity to enhance children's development and school readiness, with prekindergarten programs and early intervention programs targeting children at different moments of development. Results of existing research are mixed, and although many children experience different child care arrangements at…

Publicly funded prekindergarten programs have achieved small-to-large impacts on children's cognitive outcomes. The current study examined the impact of a prekindergarten program that implemented a coaching system and consistent literacy, language, and mathematics curricula on these and other nontargeted, essential components of school readiness,…

In the 2014 report, "Closing the Achievement Gap Through Modification of Neurocognitive and Neuroendocrine Function: Results from a Cluster Randomized Controlled Trial of an Innovative Approach to the Education of Children in Kindergarten," researchers examined the impacts of "Tools of the Mind" on cognitive and academic…

The Prosocial Attitude Blank (PAB) was designed to assess interpersonal values and ethical awareness of elementary school children. PAB was administered to 405 elementary students as one component of the evaluation of an intervention program designed to reduce interpersonal conflicts, increase literacy skills, and enhance children's ethical…

Four experiments examined children's understanding of the inverse relationship between the number of parts into which a quantity is divided and the size of each part. Found that children tended to judge that bigger shares resulted from sharing with more recipients. Seven-year olds performed correctly on a simplified equal-sharing task. Five-year…

Forty-four language delayed preschoolers received either direct instruction or interactive instruction. After 8 months, children in both settings improved significantly and substantially on syntactic and semantic measures. There were no differences between the two groups at posttest nor any significant aptitude by treatment interactions for…

The study, with 57 children (ages 3-6) enrolled in 3 Head Start classes, demonstrated that short-term, large-group basic concept instruction combining direct instruction with interactive and incidental teaching techniques resulted in significantly improved scores on the Boehm Test of Basic Concepts-Revised. (Author/DB)

Two highly contrasting models of preschool education for mildly handicapped children were compared. Direct Instruction led to greater gains on the Test of Early Language Development and the Basic Language Concepts test. Mediated Learning led to greater gains on the McCarthy Verbal and Memory scales and Mean Length of Utterance measure. (Author/VW)

Cognitive and academic behaviors promoted by an ongoing, long-term Direct Instruction preschool project for poverty level children (N=109) are described. Children who received two years of training achieved at substantially higher normative levels than children trained for only one year and this advantage continued in first and second grades.…