History of IDEA
Jeannie Oakes, Founder and Former Director
Youth Voice in School Finance
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Past Educational Opportunity Reports
Kindergarten program boosts students' vocabulary in 1st grade
- 11-29-2010
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Blog by Sarah D. Sparks/Education Week
A new randomized control trial in Mississippi has found that a good kindergarten literacy program can boost disadvantaged students' vocabulary in kindergarten by as much as an extra month of school. Early childhood programs like Mississippi's have focused heavily on early vocabulary for decades, with growing urgency since a seminal 1995 University of Kansas study showed children of parents on welfare enter school knowing about 525 words, less than half of the 1,100-word vocabulary of children of parents in professional jobs. bThe Regional Educational Laboratory Southeast, housed at the SERVE Center of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, evaluated the Kindergarten PAVEd for Success program, which trains teachers to supplement their normal literacy instruction. Pam Finney, the research management leader for the study, said the program was purposely "not a very complicated intervention," and it helps teachers engage in the same complex conversations that the Kansas study showed professional parents have with their children, "introducing 50 cent words as opposed to 25 cent words," as Ms. Finney put it. (more…)
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