When I Think of Child Development

Testing for Intelligence

The Abecedarian Project is a study that was conducted in the 70's that explored the effects that early childhood learning has on children throughout their life. The study had a number of children attending high quality early childhood care centers. Then the researcher would do follow-up studies when the children grew to ages, 12, 15, 21, 30, and 35, the researcher would observe whether or not these children seemed to have been impacted by their early childhood education.

In order to be able to truly discover whether or not these children were effected by having had a high quality early childhood education the researchers also had a control group of children that did have any early childhood education in order to compare and contrast the differences between those who did have an early childhood education.

As it turns out the researchers were in fact right about what they believed to be true, as what I as an early childhood professional believe as well, that early childhood education does in fact have positive long lasting effects on children, and how imperative it is that all children should be able to receive quality early childhood education.