Dionne Rose, Staff Reporter
CHILDREN ATTENDING preparatory schools have an advantage over
students who attend primary schools, according to a new study published by the Planning Institute of Jamaica (PIOJ).
In comparison to the United States, primary school students continued to maintain below average academic performances while preparatory school students were performing above average.
Dr. Maureen Samms-Vaughan, senior lecturer in Child
Health, Child Development and Behaviour at the University of the West Indies, who did the research, said that primary school students were weaker at reading and mathematics than their prep school counterparts.
READING LEVEL
"Only 50 per cent of children were at the grade one reading level at the end of grade one", she revealed. "The grade one environments (at primary schools) were inadequate in space for children to explore in the activities that were present for children," she said.
The study entitled, Profiles: The Jamaican Pre-School Child, the status of early childhood development in Jamaica, was conducted among 245 students ages six to seven in six parishes St. Catherine, Clarendon, St. Elizabeth, Manchester, St. James and St. Mary.
Dr. Samms-Vaughan also contributed the results of the findings to the socio-economic status of the parents of these children.
"The disparity is wider in
reading and this is probably because lower socio-economic children have to deal with mathematics with their day-to-day experience. So, the disparity in mathematics tends to be somewhat less than the disparity in language," she said.
PROGRAMME STRUCTURE
Dr. Samms-Vaughan observed that very few of the institutions actually had a programme structure that was set and maintained.
Other contributing factors to the finding, she said, were that early childhood school environments at Grade one were lacking in material to adequately stimualte children and lacked space and furniture as opposed to the prep schools.
One positive, she noted, was primary schools had adequate interaction between children and that these children were adequately supervised.
