Distinguish the typical educational programs available to children in the preschool years. Early childhood educational programs, offered as centerbased or school-based child care or as preschool, can lead to cognitive and social advances. The United States lacks a coordinated national policy on preschool education. The major federal initiative in U.S. preschool education has been the Head Start program, which has yielded mixed results.

Short Answer

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Early childhood educational programs can be categorized as center-based, school-based child care, or preschool. These programs aim to enhance the cognitive and social development of preschool children. In the U.S., there is no unified national policy for preschool education, though the primary federal program, the Head Start program, aims to cater to low-income families’ children's needs, although its results are mixed.

Step by step solution

01

Define early childhood educational programs

These are programs designed for children in the preschool age, serving to ignite the cognitive and social development of the children. These programs can either be center-based, where activities are conducted in child care centers, or school-based, where activities are conducted in a school setting.
02

Analyze the U.S. policy on preschool education

In the United States, there is no coordinated national policy that governs preschool education. This means that policies may vary from state to state, and preschools can be run in a variety of ways.
03

Discuss the Head Start program

The Head Start program is the major federal initiative in the U.S. aimed at providing children of low-income families with a comprehensive program to meet their emotional, social, health, nutritional, and psychological needs. Despite the admirable goals of this program, it has yielded mixed results, requiring further scrutiny and evaluation.

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Most popular questions from this chapter

Describe a child's bodily growth and overall health risks during the preschool years. In addition to gaining height and weight, the bodies of preschool children undergo changes in shape and structure. Children grow more slender, and their bones and muscles strengthen. Children in the preschool years are generally quite healthy. Obesity in these years is caused by genetic and environmental factors. The greatest health threats are accidents and environmental factors.

Explain how children's language develops in the preschool years. Children rapidly progress from two-word utterances to longer, more sophisticated expressions that reflect their growing vocabularies and emerging grasp of grammar. The development of linguistic abilities is affected by socioeconomic status. The result can be lowered linguistic-and, ultimately, academic-performance by poorer children.

Summarize how Piaget explains cognitive development during the preschool years. During the stage that Piaget has described as preoperational, children are not yet able to engage in organized, formal, logical thinking. However, their development of symbolic function permits quicker and more effective thinking as they are freed from the limitations of sensorimotor learning. According to Piaget, children in the preoperational stage engage in intuitive thought for the first time, actively applying rudimentary reasoning skills to the acquisition of world knowledge.

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Summarize the information-processing approaches to cognitive development in the preschool years. A different approach to cognitive development is taken by proponents of information processing theories, who focus on preschoolers' storage and recall of information and on quantitative changes in information processing abilities (such as attention).

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