%0 Journal Article
%T ¡°Getting Ready for School:¡± A Preliminary Evaluation of a Parent-Focused School-Readiness Program
%A Kimberly G. Noble
%A Helena Duch
%A Maria Eugenia Darvique
%A Alexandra Grundleger
%A Carmen Rodriguez
%A Cassie Landers
%J Child Development Research
%D 2012
%I Hindawi Publishing Corporation
%R 10.1155/2012/259598
%X Children from disadvantaged backgrounds tend to start school with fewer school readiness skills than their more advantaged peers. Emergent literacy and math skills play an important role in this gap. The family is essential in helping children build these skills, and the active involvement of families is crucial to the success of any intervention for young children. The Getting Ready for School (GRS) program is a parent-focused curriculum designed to help parents equip their children with the skills and enthusiasm necessary for learning when they start school. Parents meet in weekly workshops led by a trained facilitator and implement the curriculum at home with their children. The objective of this pilot study was to assess the promise of the GRS intervention in children participating in an urban Head Start program and to explore parents' responses to the intervention. We hypothesized that participation in GRS would improve school readiness in literacy and math skills, relative to participation in business-as-usual Head Start. Four Head Start classrooms (two randomly selected ¡°intervention¡± and two ¡°comparison¡± classrooms) participated in this study. Preliminary analyses suggest that GRS improves school readiness over and above a Head Start-as-usual experience. Implications for early childhood programs and policies are discussed. 1. Introduction School readiness, or the development of the cognitive, social, and emotional skills necessary for children to enter school ready to learn, creates the foundation for academic success, physical and mental health, and general well-being [1]. Unfortunately, socioeconomic disadvantage tends to lead to large gaps in the development of both the cognitive [2¨C5] and socioemotional skills [6¨C8] underlying school readiness [9, 10]. By the time children enter school, disadvantaged children tend to score between one-half and one-full standard deviation lower than other children on reading and math achievement tests [8]. Additionally, socioeconomic disadvantage is associated with problems in children¡¯s self-regulation, including difficulties controlling impulses and regulating emotions [3, 4, 7, 8]. Disparities in cognitive and socioemotional development are not ameliorated during the early elementary years. Indeed, gaps in achievement tend to increase with age [10, 11], having vast implications for future life achievement [12¨C15]. Disadvantaged children of Latino descent are at particular risk for poor school readiness [16¨C18] and subsequent school failure [19]. Quality preschool programs can reduce the school-readiness
%U http://www.hindawi.com/journals/cdr/2012/259598/