Effects of a statewide pre-kindergarten program on children's achievement and behavior through sixth grade.

As state-funded pre-kindergarten (pre-K) programs expand, it is critical to investigate their short- and long-term effects. This article presents the results through sixth grade of a longitudinal randomized control study of the effects of a scaled-up, state-supported pre-K program. The analytic sample includes 2,990 children from low-income families who applied to oversubscribed pre-K program sites across the state and were randomly assigned to offers of admission or a wait list control. Data through sixth grade from state education records showed that the children randomly assigned to attend pre-K had lower state achievement test scores in third through sixth grades than control children, with the strongest negative effects in sixth grade. A negative effect was also found for disciplinary infractions, attendance, and receipt of special education services, with null effects on retention. The implications of these findings for pre-K policies and practices are discussed. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Teaching Spanish-Speaking Caregivers to Implement EMT en Español: A Small Randomized Trial.

PURPOSE: The primary purpose of this study was to examine the effects of using the Teach-Model-Coach-Review approach to teach Spanish-speaking caregivers from low-income households to implement EMT en Español with their young children with language delays. A secondary purpose was to explore the effects of the caregiver-implemented intervention on children's vocabulary. A final and more exploratory goal was to gain insight into caregivers' perceptions of the intervention. METHOD: 21 caregiver-child dyads participated in the intent-to-treat randomized control trial. Their children were 30-43 months old with language delays. Dyads were randomly assigned to receive 24 caregiver training sessions delivered at home in Spanish or a wait list control group. Pre, post and 3-month follow assessments included observational measures of caregiver-child interactions and child standardized vocabulary assessments. Caregivers completed surveys rating their perception of the intervention. RESULTS: Caregivers in the intervention group had significantly higher percentages of matched turns, expansions, and targets at post-assessment and of expansions and targets at follow-up compared to the control group. Overall, children in the intervention condition had significantly higher receptive vocabulary scores and performed better than children in the control condition on observational measure of their lexical diversity, with moderate effect sizes for most outcomes. Caregivers perceived the intervention as effective and culturally appropriate. CONCLUSIONS: Teach-Model-Coach-Review is effective in increasing Spanish-speaking caregivers' use of EMT en Español strategies with their young children with language delays. The intervention also appears to be effective for child vocabulary outcomes and acceptable to caregivers.

The Intentional Selection Assumption.

There exists a rich literature describing how social context influences decision making. Here, we propose a novel framing of social influences, the Intentional Selection Assumption. This framework proposes that, when a person is presented with a set of options by another social agent, people may treat the set of options as intentionally selected, reflecting the chooser's inferences about the presenter and the presenter's goals. To describe our proposal, we draw analogies to the cognition literature on sampling inferences within concept learning. This is done to highlight how the Intentional Selection Assumption accounts for both normative (e.g., comparing perceived utilities) and subjective (e.g., consideration of context relevance) principles in decision making, while also highlighting how analogous findings in the concept learning literature can aid in bridging these principles by drawing attention to the importance of potential sampling assumptions within decision making paradigms. We present the two behavioral experiments that provide support to this proposal and find that social-contextual cues influence choice behavior with respect to the induction of sampling assumptions. We then discuss a theoretical framework of the Intentional Selection Assumption alongside the possibility of its potential relationships to contemporary models of choice. Overall, our results emphasize the flexibility of decision makers with respect to social-contextual factors without sacrificing systematicity regarding the preference for specific options with a higher value or utility.

Epistemic Trust and Education: Effects of Informant Reliability on Student Learning of Decimal Concepts.

The epistemic trust literature emphasizes that children's evaluations of informants' trustworthiness affects learning, but there is no evidence that epistemic trust affects learning in academic domains. The current study investigated how reliability affects decimal learning. Fourth and fifth graders (N = 122; Mage = 10.1 years) compared examples from consistently accurate and inaccurate informants (consistent) or informants who were each sometimes accurate and inaccurate (inconsistent). Fourth graders had higher conceptual knowledge and fewer misconceptions in the consistent condition than the inconsistent condition, and vice versa for fifth graders due to differences in prior exposure to decimals. Given the same examples, learning differed depending on informant reliability. Thus, epistemic trust is a malleable factor that affects learning in an academic domain.

Is self-explanation worth the time? A comparison to additional practice.

BACKGROUND: Self-explanation, or generating explanations to oneself in an attempt to make sense of new information, can promote learning. However, self-explaining takes time, and the learning benefits of this activity need to be rigorously evaluated against alternative uses of this time. AIMS: In the current study, we compared the effectiveness of self-explanation prompts to the effectiveness of solving additional practice problems (to equate for time on task) and to solving the same number of problems (to equate for problem-solving experience). SAMPLE: Participants were 69 children in grades 2-4. METHODS: Students completed a pre-test, brief intervention session, and a post- and retention test. The intervention focused on solving mathematical equivalence problems such as 3 + 4 + 8 = _ + 8. Students were randomly assigned to one of three intervention conditions: self-explain, additional-practice, or control. RESULTS: Compared to the control condition, self-explanation prompts promoted conceptual and procedural knowledge. Compared to the additional-practice condition, the benefits of self-explanation were more modest and only apparent on some subscales. CONCLUSIONS: The findings suggest that self-explanation prompts have some small unique learning benefits, but that greater attention needs to be paid to how much self-explanation offers advantages over alternative uses of time.

Developing procedural flexibility: are novices prepared to learn from comparing procedures?

BACKGROUND: A key learning outcome in problem-solving domains is the development of procedural flexibility, where learners know multiple procedures and use them appropriately to solve a range of problems (e.g., Verschaffel, Luwel, Torbeyns, & Van Dooren, 2009). However, students often fail to become flexible problem solvers in mathematics. To support flexibility, teaching standards in many countries recommend that students be exposed to multiple procedures early in instruction and be encouraged to compare them. AIMS: We experimentally evaluated this recommended instructional practice for supporting procedural flexibility during a classroom lesson, relative to two alternative conditions. The alternatives reflected the common instructional practice of delayed exposure to multiple procedures, either with or without comparison of procedures. SAMPLE: Grade 8 students from two public schools (N= 198) were randomly assigned to condition. Students had not received prior instruction on multi-step equation solving, which was the topic of our lessons. METHOD: Students learned about multi-step equation solving under one of three conditions in math class for about 3 hr. They also completed a pre-test, post-test, and 1-month-retention test on their procedural knowledge, procedural flexibility, and conceptual knowledge of equation solving. RESULTS: Novices who compared procedures immediately were more flexible problem solvers than those who did not, even on a 1-month retention test. Although condition had limited direct impact on conceptual and procedural knowledge, greater flexibility was associated with greater knowledge of both types. CONCLUSIONS: Comparing procedures can support flexibility in novices and early introduction to multiple procedures may be one important reason.