Child-Initiated Learning Activities for Young Children Living in Poverty

Child-Initiated Learning Activities for Young Children Living in Poverty. This is an essay with some good ideas for helping elementary school students from poor families learn better in school.



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Should Head Start and other preschool programs for young children living in poverty center on teacher-directed, large-group academic lessons or on teacher-supported, child-initiated learning activities? The concerns reflected in this long-standing debate are that an exclusively teacher-directed approach fails to encourage children's social and emotional development and creativity, while an approach based exclusively on child-initiated activities may not sufficiently stimulate poor children's academic development. These concerns are echoed today in the struggle of early childhood educators to cope with academic-learning mandates that conflict with their own child-centered dispositions, particularly in school districts that have been less successful in helping children achieve academic success. This Digest discusses the findings of empirical studies on teacher-directed and child-initiated preschool programs.



LONG-TERM PRESCHOOL CURRICULUM COMPARISON STUDIES



Three long-term preschool curriculum comparison studies began in the 1970s--the High/Scope Preschool Curriculum Comparison Study (Schweinhart & Weikart, 1997), the Louisville Head Start Study (Miller & Bizzell, 1983), and the University of Illinois Study (Karnes, Schwedel, & Williams, 1983). All three included the Direct Instruction model--which offered scripted, teacher-directed academic instruction--and a Nursery School model, in which children initiated their own learning activities with minimal teacher support. The High/Scope study included the High/Scope model, in which children initiated learning activities with substantial teacher support. The Louisville and Illinois studies included several additional teacher-directed models and the Montessori model, which encouraged child-initiated activities with didactic materials.



These three studies found that children in Direct Instruction programs intellectually outperformed children in child-initiated-activities programs during and up to a year after the preschool program, but not thereafter. In the Louisville study, the Nursery School children showed higher verbal-social participation and increased more in ambition and aggressiveness than did the Direct Instruction children, but both groups scored lower than their peers on inventiveness. In the Illinois study, 78% of the Nursery School group, but only 48% of the Direct Instruction group and 47% of the no-program group graduated from high school.