Play Behavior and Competence in Ghetto Four-Year-Olds

TLDR: In this article, Tuck et al. present a study at the Martin Luther King Family Center and supported by the Kenneth F. Montgomery Charitable Foundation, in collaboration with the Illinois Department of Mental Health.

Abstract: 1 Research carried out at the Dr. Martin Luther King Family Center and supported by the Kenneth F. Montgomery Charitable Foundation, in collaboration with the Illinois Department of Mental Health. Additional support was provided by the National Institute of Health. General Research Support Grant 1-So 1 FR 05 666-01. ZThe authors express their appreciation and gratitude to Mr. Sammie Tuck, Jr.. Mrs. Anlonia Knock. and the parents, children, and staff of the Center. especially Dr. Marvin Brottman. Dr. James Hill, and Mrs. Juanita Gilmore. For several years the authors have been working with socially disadvantaged children attempting to better understand the emergence of personal competence under poverty conditions. Our efforts have been carried out with the conviction that insights derived from the mental health practitioner’s understanding of a child’s functioning can be directly applied to educational programs. Collaboration between clinicians and school personnel seems to be a natural phase in the development of programs to meet the individual developmental needs of large numbers of children. Educators have long recognized that pupil assessment is an indispensable accompaniment to curriculum planning. In order to effectively meet educational needs, it is important to know which children are relatively ready to learn and capable of learning from the typical curriculum, which children have particular strengths which indicate capability for accelerated development, and which children have limited or major deficits which require special intervention to facilitate learning. Over the years, psychological testing has been the preferred technique for assessing individual educational needs. Although such tests are considerably valuable in some circumstances, a major line of criticism relating to their use with disadvantaged populations has been their cultural bias. Another problem has been the almost exclusive focus on cognitive skills rather than accessibility for learning (Meier, 1969). These tests also have limited value with preschool and kindergarten children. For adequate assessment of educational needs and strengths, it is necessary to consider not only the level of the