Orange County NC Website
Browse       Search
Daycare Effects on Preschool <br /> 4 <br /> preschool intellectual development. The New York City Infant Daycare Study (Golden, <br /> Rosenbluth, Grossi, Policare, Freeman, & Brownlee, 1978) followed 400 poverty children <br /> reared at home or enrolled in one of 31 service-oriented, licensed, pubic and private, <br /> group and family infant daycare programs. They found that children attending the <br /> daycare centers significantly outscored the home-reared children on IQ tests <br /> administered at 18 and 36 months of age. Again, the children in daycare centers tended <br /> not to exhibit the marked decline in average IQ scores observed in the home-reared and <br /> babysitter-reared poverty children. <br /> Implicit in these findings is the assumption that quality daycare affects both the <br /> overall level and trends across time of intellectual development of poverty children. <br /> While it has been implicitly hypothesized that disadvantaged children receiving daycare <br /> show a different pattern of cognitive development than non-daycare disadavantaged <br /> children (Belsky and Steinberg, 1978; Etaugh, 1980) this hypothesis has not been <br /> specifically tested. The present study explicitly examines this assumption by comparing <br /> the level and the patterns of preschool intellectual development of pchildren who <br /> g <br /> 0 <br /> attended a university-based, cognitively-oriented, daycare with children who had at <br /> least some daycare in corn munity centers that met federal standards and children with <br /> little or no center-based daycare. It was hypothesized that the level of treatment <br /> intensity would be reflected in the degree to which the cognitive level and developmental <br /> trends differed among disadvantaged children receiving university-based daycare, <br /> co m m unity-based daycare, or no center daycare. Specifically the university-based <br /> daycare was viewed as providing the most intense treatment and the corn m unity-based <br /> daycare as providing moderately intense treatment.Finally, we examined the final <br /> preschool IQ scores to estimate the effects of quality co m m unity- and university-based <br /> daycare on the cognitive level of the poverty children when they entered the public <br /> schools. <br />