Canadian Council on Learning | Conseil Canadien sur l'Apprentissage

This project will allow the achievement of two complementary objectives that lie within a longitudinal study launched in 2004 with 150 children aged 5 to 12 months in the Greater Montreal Area receiving or not receiving educational child care: 1) to enhance our understanding of the long-term effects of educational child-care attendance by measuring children's developmental level after 24 months, thus when they are 36 months old; and, 2) with the resulting data, to engage in knowledge exchange activities in the professional environments targeted by the study. The three research questions of the project are: 1) What is the level of development (cognitive, socio-affective, and motor skills) of 36-month-old children who attended or did not attend day care since their first year of life? 2) Do the social-demographic characteristics of the child’s family temper the relation between day care attendance and the child’s development? 3) What are the components of child-care quality associated with positive development of 36-month-old children?

In a Montreal-based study, preschoolers from families immigrating from developing countries show signs of developmental gaps when we compare them to non-immigrant children. These differences can be entirely explained by unstable living conditions. The objective of this study is to measure the effectiveness of an innovative cognitive stimulation program, the EgALIté program. This program's goals are to enhance speech, pre-reading and pre-writing skills, focus, self-regulation of behaviours, and social skills. What makes this program special is that it integrates the parent in the process, thus maximizing opportunities of integrating acquired skills in day-to-day life.

Continued improvements in the numeracy skills of Canadians are crucial to both economic and social progress. Children’s acquisition of numeracy and literacy skills in school is strongly related to their early experiences. Accordingly, awareness of the importance of early literacy has increased among parents and child care (ELCC) practitioners but numeracy has only recently been considered equally relevant. The goal of this project is to conduct a survey of ELCC practitioners across Canada to allow a comprehensive description of their awareness, knowledge, and practices about children’s early numeracy and literacy.

The overall purpose of the proposed project is to complete the development of a statistically sound, valid, reliable, user-friendly, and well-accepted assessment tool for assessing inclusion quality in early childhood learning and child-care settings.

The completion of the tool, and its acceptance by the community, will advance the development of children with special needs as well as typically-developing children and children of diverse ethno-cultural backgrounds in inclusive learning and child-care settings by contributing objective, evidence-based inclusion quality measures to the field -- measures that will suggest next steps for parents, individual practitioners, classrooms, centres, trainers, researchers, and policy makers.

Our study will focus on the research priorities of school readiness in literacy through the development and implementation of an innovative early childhood language learning program and to evaluate this program to demonstrate its capacity to improve early learning. The primary research question is to determine whether a scientifically-based language development instructional program will yield higher scores on school readiness measurement instruments in specific knowledge areas of identifying letters of the alphabet, attaching sounds to letters, and reading simple words for children aged 3 years and above entering an elementary school program.

This project will develop a two-step assessment process for children (aged 4 to 5) intended to provide a comprehensive picture of a child’s developmental level of mathematical understanding and to identify students who are at risk for failing in mathematics. First, assessment instruments will be developed based on both psychometric and developmental approaches and piloted in classrooms. Secondly, these instruments will be standardized with another cohort of students. Teachers will be closely involved in both steps. The second cohort will be included in a future longitudinal study that will investigate issues such as predictive validity of the assessment process.

Children who receive child-care services during the preschool years may be better prepared to learn and function well when they enter the formal school system. However, this may only be true if the child-care services they receive are of good quality. Furthermore, some children may benefit more than others. For instance, children who develop in family environments characterized by high levels of risk may be especially likely to benefit from high-quality child-care services. In this study, we test whether a) higher child-care quality between 2½ and 4½ years of age is related to better school readiness at 4½ years and b) the association between child-care quality and school readiness is more pronounced for children from high-risk families.

The goals of this study are to examine the nature and quality of instruction in child- care centres using extensive existing data. We focus on areas of instruction that have been identified as important in preparing children for a successful transition to school: literacy, numeracy, and social competence. Observational and survey data will enable us to describe instructional quality in each of these areas in a diverse sample of 103 Toronto child-care centre classrooms. Data were also collected from parents and teachers of over 1000 3- to 5-year-old children cared for and educated in these classrooms. Predictors of the quality of instruction and concurrent child functioning associated with that instruction will be explored.