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In England The Transition Begins Around The Age Of 5, And Into A More Formal ...

In England the transition begins around the age of 5, and into a more formal curriculum one year later (Sanders et al, 2005). This report also highlighted the question that staff may not be appreciating the anxiety for children and parents at this time, which proves quite surprising. The recommendations of the report included: a communication between staff of Foundation Stage, staff in Year 1 and parents to plan for the child's needs; that School's should have resources to enable the children in Year 1 to have play-based activities, for role play, construction and outdoor learning; that formal sitting and listen in Year 1 should be reduced, and more opportunities for learning through play; and that there is a further need for research into this transition.
In February of this year a study (FGP 2006) was carried out in the USA on 240 state funded Pre-K programs for 4 year-olds. The assessment was selecting one classroom at random, and within that classroom four children were chosen for individual assessment in the areas of language, literacy and number skills. The major findings in this study are reproduced here.
Children:
More than half of the children enrolled were from low-income families.
African American, Latino, and Asian children were more likely than White children to be in a Pre-K class with a high concentration of poor children.
A large percentage of the mothers had only a high school education or less.
Almost one-quarter of the children spoke a language other than English at home.
With their entry into Pre-K, the language ability of most children from low-income families was below the national average, as was their math ability. On standard measures of language and math, these children made small but meaningful gains from fall to spring of their Pre-K year.
Pre-K teachers:
They averaged 42 years of age; most were female and White.
Overall, about 70% of teachers had at least a bachelor's degree.
About half had at least a bachelor's degree and state certification to teach 4-year-olds.
About 30% had a two-year degree or no formal degree past high school.
Pre-k teachers' salaries were higher than those of child care teachers and approached the salaries of public school teachers.
Teachers with lower qualifications (less than a bachelor's degree) were more likely to teach poor children and children who were African American or Latino.

The finding's highlighted the concerns of teachers not being able to give the high quality experiences required to those children that need it most. It also reveals that using the widely used measure of classroom quality of Early Childhood Environmental Rating Scale-Revised (where a score of 7 is ‘excellent', a score of 5 is ‘good', and a score of 3 is ‘minimal') the average score was 3.86.

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