classes hosting 0.ch.123 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

“This is an exciting topic, but it is too early to draw any conclusions because this area is so underexplored,” remarks psychologist Lena Malofeeva of High/Scope Educational Research Foundation in Ypsilanti, Mich. She and her colleagues have also studied how preschool affects development by tracking into adulthood 119 poor, black children who attended either a high-quality preschool program or who did not attend preschool. The researchers found that preschool girls graduated from high school more often and were treated for fewer mental problems than non-preschool girls. Former preschool boys showed relatively low levels of criminal arrests and drug abuse.

But that study did not address classroom sex ratios. Moller and his colleagues analyzed data collected as part of an effort to assess classroom needs in the Rochester, N.Y., public schools from fall 2003 to spring 2004. They studied 70 preschool classes hosting a total of 806 children, ages 3 ½ to 6. The student population was 57 percent black, 17 percent white, 15 percent Hispanic, 2 percent Asian and 9 percent of unreported race or ethnicity. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire Nearly 9 of 10 children came from families with poverty-level incomes. Class sizes ranged from eight to 21 students. Trained observers rated the quality of all classes as high in areas that included space, facilities, program structure and activities.

The team found that girls displayed generally good progress over the 6 ½-month school year on teacher-rated measures of thinking skills, social abilities and motor proficiency. Girls did just as well in classes with a preponderance of boys as they did in majority-girl classes, the researchers say in a paper published online June 4 and slated to appear in Early Childhood Research Quarterly.

Boys developed more slowly than girls did on the same three measures, and especially on thinking skills, if they attended classes with a surplus of boys. In majority-girl classes, boys developed at the same rate as girls.