The Effects of Day Care Intervetion on Teacher's Ratings of the Elementary School Discourse Skills in Disadvantaged Children

Abstract

The aim of this study was to assess whether a day care intervention programme for children from impoverished backgrounds could affect teacher's ratings GI their language use in the classroom in early elementary school. 'Ihwr cere 32k experimental children (who had received a day care intervention programme) and 36 control children in the initial study. At school entry, a comparison child from the same classroom was selected for each of the experimental and control children. The children were followed for three years in school. Besides collecting IQ and achievement data, teachers were asked to fill out the Adaptive Language Inventory (ALI) which measured children's use of language in narrative and discourse situations in the classroom. The results indicated that although the comparison group was rated more highly than the experimental and control group, the experimental group was rated more favourably than the control group over all three years on three of the four major scales of the ALI. There was no indication of a decrease in the size of effects by year 3. Regression analyses generally indicated that the ALI was moderately related to verbal IQ and highly related to reading recognition and comprehension concurrently and over three years. The results suggest that an early intervention programme can be effective in changing and maintaining teachers' perceptions of the narrative and discourse skills of children through early elementary school. In addition, the study suggests that these narrative and discourse skills may be important for reading and other verbal abilities.