UF Study: Preschoolers In Programs For Poor Kids Have Less Access To Literacy

January 22, 2003

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — Disadvantaged children who attend preschools developed for poor kids are exposed to fewer books and have less opportunity to learn to read and write than other preschoolers, a study by a University of Florida researcher shows.

What’s more, some of those children may leave the programs knowing less than when they started.

Kids enrolled in Head Start and two other early-childhood programs for poor children – child-development day care and public school pre-kindergarten – had less access to the alphabet, instruction in letter identification, and assistance in writing and printing than low -income children enrolled in two privately funded programs, the study found.

The findings suggest that such programs do not adequately prepare these kids for school. Nearly a million disadvantaged kids nationwide are enrolled in Head Start alone.

“According to the most recent national evaluation of Head Start, not only did children enter Head Start, on average, almost a full standard deviation below national norms in emergent literacy skills, but they also experienced a significant decline in letter recognition and book knowledge after spending a year in Head Start classes. My study shows why this may happen,” said Anne McGill-Franzen, a UF professor of education who was the principal investigator on an in-depth study of particular preschools funded by the U.S. Department of Education

“Not only Head Start but all the programs I observed that were specifically established to develop readiness in low-income children failed to provide appropriate literacy experiences, she said. “On the basis of the results of the present study, we believe that the literacy experiences we observe in the publicly subsidized preschools are inadequate to support literate development,” said McGill-Franzen, who conducted the study while at the State University of New York at Albany.

The study, published in the fall issue of the quarterly Journal of Educational Psychology, followed 21 children through five different types of preschools representing the range of early childhood programs in the state of New York. The children were observed at least two days a month for eight months for literacy activities, such as interactions with books, writing, copying, scribbling or talking about printed work. In addition to classroom observation, researchers also gathered information from audiotape transcription of lessons, personal interviews with children and classroom curriculum materials, including the children’s work.

The three government-subsidized preschools required the children’s families to meet federal poverty guidelines for welfare or “working poor.” These preschools served predominantly low-income, African-American families in racially segregated neighborhoods. The two privately funded preschools were a Jewish nursery school that enrolled predominately middle-income children and a university day care center, in which the children were predominately low-income but whose parents were well educated, multicultural and multilingual. Teachers at all the preschools varied considerably in education and training levels.

The number of participants in the qualitative study was limited to 21 in order to collect detailed case histories necessary for the findings to be translated to broader groups of preschoolers, said McGill-Franzen, who specializes in reading and reading disabilities. She also hoped the more-detailed information would help determine the reasons behind the learning losses the children experienced.

The study found children in all five preschools spent less time participating in literary activities than the researchers expected they would. Although some children spent up to nine hours a day at their preschools, the average daily time spent on literary activities ranged from 20 minutes at the public pre-kindergarten to about an hour at the university day care, the study found.

Teachers at the public pre-kindergarten spent an average of nine minutes a day reading aloud to pupils while those at the Jewish nursery school spent an average of 29 minutes a day doing so.

Children spent even less time writing. While children in the two private schools spent an average of 10 and 15 minutes per day writing, printing, scribbling or pretend writing, the public pre-kindergarten kids spent less than one minute a day in these activities.

“The children for whom preschool was most critical had the least opportunity to engage in literary activities,” McGill-Franzen said.

Based on her research, she speculates excessive regulations and constraints, social class segregation, uncertified teachers and inadequate curriculum guidelines all may contribute to deficiencies in the government-subsidized programs.

Lea McGee, a professor of teacher education at the University of Alabama and president-elect of the National Reading Conference, said she supports McGill-Franzen’s finding that what young children learn depends heavily on what adults offer them.

“It is obvious from her research that children in the different preschool settings she observed received very different opportunities to learn about literacy practices,” McGee said.

When children are offered only a few practices in reading and writing, they are not developing and being socialized into good literacy habits, McGee said.

“If you want children to learn to build structures with blocks, you offer them blocks to play with and interact with them occasionally as they build,” McGee said. “If you want children to know about books and the kinds of language and stories found in books, you read books with children in ways that make the stories accessible to children.”