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The New York Times reports:
As school reformers nationwide push to expand publicly funded prekindergarten and enact more stringent standards, more students are being exposed at ever younger ages to formal math and phonics lessons [...]. That has worried some education experts and frightened those parents who believe that children of that age should be playing with blocks, not sitting still as a teacher explains a shape's geometric characteristics.
But now a new national study suggests that preschools that do not mix enough fiber into their curriculum may be doing their young charges a disservice.
The study found that by the end of kindergarten, children who had attended one year of "academic-oriented preschool" outperformed peers who had attended less academic-focused preschools by, on average, the equivalent of two and a half months of learning in literacy and math.
"Simply dressing up like a firefighter or building an exquisite Lego edifice may not be enough," said Bruce Fuller, the lead author of the study, conducted by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley. "If you can combine creative play with rich language, formal conversations and math concepts, that's more likely to yield the cognitive gains we observed."
U.S. News published a related piece recently arguing for more attention to preschool curricula and specific content, in addition to other measures of preschool programs. In contrast, a story in the Atlantic last year pointed out new "academic" approaches to preschool may actually be doing more harm than good. And any immediate gains (as cited in the new study) frequently turn out to be temporary. One oft-cited alternative is Finland's approach, which delays formal schooling until age 7, after a year of relatively unstructured government-mandated kindergarten.
(Score: 2) by meustrus on Wednesday June 07 2017, @11:53PM
Whatever happened to the relatively insightful AC I was responding to? Your comment is profoundly anti-knowledge and anti-science, as well as destructive to an ongoing conversation.
The word "fact" is used a bit too judiciously, I think, when non-scientists talk science. The only "facts" are simple, objective observations, such as that apples fall toward the ground when they become detached from trees. Even well-accepted ideas, such as that something called "gravity" is pulling the apple toward the Earth because of its huge mass, are still not "facts" even when we use our thorough understanding of them to launch satellites into orbit.
When talking sociology, the "facts" are buried deep in the statistics. We have survey results that represent mostly factual responses to specific questions (though always prone to some transcription error), but that does not translate into facts about whom we are (it says at least as much about whom we would like to be seen to be). We have factual test results, but that does not translate into facts about the test subjects (beyond that subject X answered Y to question Z) because the test may be invalid or fail to reflect what we think it reflects.
So what "argument" do you think is actually a "fact"? Do you think you live in a world in which complicated biological processes are routinely proven as robustly as that 0.999... = 1 [wikipedia.org]? Not everything is an objective truth. Sorry.
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?