"Look what I can do!" : Ameliorating the Effects of Poverty with Preschool Education

Abstract

Previous studies have documented the positive effects of early education in highrisk children. A screening measure was created to determine if there were any significant differences between the performance of scholarship and non-scholarship students at a local preschool. A new measure was created because none of the current developmental or psycho-educational measures met the needs of the program. Existing measures did not match the ages of the children in the program and they took too long to administer, required too much training, or were difficult to interpret. The new measure is composed of 130 items encompassing 4 areas of development: cognitive/language, motor, social/emotional, and adaptive/self-help. A subset of the items (that was relevant to the child's age) was given to the students twice this year. The students' scores increased significantly over time, which indicates that the students were learning new material throughout the year. Additionally, there were no significant differences (in either the total scores or the areas of development) between the scholarship and non-scholarship students at any point during the testing. This suggests that the early intervention is working to ameliorate the effects of poverty in this sample. Future studies should replicate the current one in order to obtain more data in a wider variety of subjects.