Preschool Peers May Boost Language Skills in Kids
Preschool students with poor language skills show much greater improvement if they’re placed in a classroom with higher-achieving children, compared to being in a class with other low-achievers, researchers say.
The findings are important because many preschool programs in the United States are targeted to poor children, whose development of language skills may be lagging, according to lead author Laura Justice, a professor at Ohio State University’s School of Teaching and Learning.
“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,” she said in a university news release. “We need to pay more attention to the composition of preschool classrooms.”
She and her colleagues looked at 338 children in 49 preschool classrooms and found that, among children with
