Preschoolers' Language Skills Improve More When They're Placed With More-Skilled Peers
[Source: Medical News Today]
Preschool children with relatively poor language skills improve more if they are placed in classrooms with high-achieving students, a new study found.
Researchers found that children with relatively poor language skills either didn’t improve over the course of one academic year, or actually lost ground in development of language skills, when they were placed with other low-achieving students.
The results have important implications because many preschool programs in the United States are targeted to children in poverty, who may exhibit lags in their development of language skills, said Laura Justice, lead author of the study and professor in the School of Teaching and Learning at Ohio State University.
“The way preschool works in the United States, we tend to cluster kids who have relatively low language skills in the same classrooms, and that is not good for their language development,” Justice said.
Read the Rest of this Article on Medical News Today
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