This "Fourth Annual Report Card" marks a new chapter for the Boston Opportunity Agenda. For the first time, the Boston Opportunity Agenda is reporting student outcomes across Boston Public Schools and Catholic and charter schools. This provides a comprehensive baseline view of the education pipeline for the city's K-12 students. The…

Most Mauritian children face a language challenge as they leave their homes and start school. While most Mauritian children speak a French-lexified Creole as home language, the Mauritian primary education programme promotes English as the main language of literacy and the only written medium of instruction. In such a context, the preschool has the…

This rapid review of research evidence was commissioned by the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA) to investigate the issue of relative age in the international context. The review findings are drawn from 18 research studies published from 2000 to 2008 and carried out in Australia, Chile, the United Kingdom and the USA together with…

Early childhood education in Kenya serves the critical purpose of preparing young children for primary education. Notwithstanding the associated benefits for society as a whole, the government of Kenya is involved minimally. Indeed, parents are responsible for planning, developing and managing different early childhood programs. Consequently,…

To reduce the high repetition rates in early years of primary school, the government of Cambodia piloted a school readiness program (SRP) in the first two months of Grade 1 of primary school. This study examines whether such intervention has effects on students' immediate acquisition of school readiness skills as well as students' longer term…

"Contemporary Debates in Childhood Education and Development" is a unique resource and reference work that brings together leading international researchers and thinkers, with divergent points of view, to discuss contemporary problems and questions in childhood education and developmental psychology. Through an innovative format whereby leading…

The study involving 108 kindergartners revealed that while children at extreme opposite ends of a school readiness continuum differed reliably in the percentage of normative stroke directions used to construct horizontal, vertical, and circular lines, the overall correlation was sufficiently low to suggest caution in using this data in screening.…

Several years ago, the state of South Carolina turned to experts in early childhood education to address the school readiness issue for its K-2 schools. Rather than asking, "Is this child ready for school?," the state created a program assessment system that reframed the question of school readiness by asking, "Is this school ready…

State-level policy attention to young children's early learning opportunities burgeons; a sense of urgency exists to identify reform agendas that are both effective and sustainable. "P-3" often is used as the term for the first level of a seamless P-20 system that stretches from early childhood through post-secondary education. While it…

Set within the market-driven context in educare for young children in Hong Kong, a Special Administrative Region of the People's Republic of China, this paper points to the importance of exploring the definitions of quality in early childhood programmes from the multiple perspectives of school stakeholders. This study describes two preschools that…

This "Third Annual Report Card" looks at improvements in the cradle-to-career educational pipeline, the areas where Boston has made modest progress but still has a great deal of work to do, and the places where observers have failed to see the gains that are needed to ensure that Boston is a city of opportunity for all. This report card…

Examination of the predictive validity of the Gesell School Readiness Screening Test with 84 kindergarten-age children found the procedure effective in predicting child success or failure in kindergarten and that within four-six years the chronological age of children entering kindergarten is unrelated to eventual success of failure in…

The efficiency of school readiness test, mental age, and specific sensory and perceptual skills was tested as predictor of word recognition at the end of the first school year. When variables were examined by stepwise regression analysis and partial correlations, school readiness test appeared as the most efficient predictor. (Author)

In order to better establish baseline information on the social, physical, linguistic, and cognitive skills of children entering Maryland kindergartens, the state selected the Work Sampling System (WSS), a component of the Maryland Model for School Readiness, as the early childhood assessment system for evaluating entering kindergartners' skills…

In Wake County (North Carolina), kindergarten teachers assess all their entering students with the locally developed Kindergarten Initial Assessment, which includes: (1) an assessment of personal, social, language and literacy, physical, and mathematics skills; (2) an evaluation of print concepts; (3) a visual motor skill index; (4) the…