雅思课外读物--Does online preschool program work?

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今天，易伯华雅思君要和大家分享的这篇文章叫“Does online preschool program work?”大家注意，这里的work是翻译成奏效的意思，而不是工作的意思。在线的学前教育有效吗？这是一个值得思考的问题，现在的家长都有自己的工作，小朋友上课下课去学校也不方便，所以今天就一起来谈谈在线学前教育那些事儿吧！

Preschool is good for children, but it’s expensive.

Can 4-year-olds learn what they need to know for kindergarten by sitting in

front of a computer for 15 minutes a day?

Utah is betting they can. This year, more than 6,600 children across the

state are learning by logging on to laptops at home in a taxpayer-funded online

preschool program that is unlike any other.

This is preschool without circle time on the carpet, free play with friends

and real, live teachers. In online preschool, children navigate(航行)through a

series of lessons, games and songs with the help of a computer mouse and two

animated raccoons(浣熊)named Rusty and Rosy.

The Obama administration last year awarded an $11.5 million grant to expand

the online program into rural communities to study how well it prepares children

for kindergarten. Schools in South Carolina are testing it, and Idaho lawmakers

are considering a pilot program(试点项目).

It’s a sign of the growing interest among educators in using technology to

customize(定制)learning, even for the youngest children. It also gives children

who might otherwise not get any preparation for elementary school a chance to

experience an academic program.(这也给了那些上小学前原本可能没有任何准备的孩子一个机会来体验学习课程。) But it’s

also missing some ingredients(成分)— especially social and emotional learning —

that many experts and parents consider central to the education of young

children.

Utah’s approach, which is far cheaper than traditional preschool programs and

can reach students in the state’s most remote areas, is to some critics an

example of a common problem: Lawmakers want to harness(利用)the oft-touted

benefits of early-childhood education without investing enough to ensure

quality.

(犹他州的办法，虽然比传统学前方案便宜得多，而且能惠及该州最偏远地区的学生，但是在一些批评家看来，这种方法恰恰体现了一个常见的问题：为政者想利用孩子早期教育被经常吹嘘的种种好处，却又投资不够以确保其品质。)

“It’s wishful thinking(异想天开) by state legislatures,” said Steven Barnett, the

director of the National Institute for Early Education Research at Rutgers

University. “We want preschool, we want to get these great results, but we don’t

actually want to spend the money.”

State Sen. Howard A. Stephenson (R), who sponsored the bill that created the

Utah program, sees it differently. Utah is one of 10 states that lack a

state-funded traditional preschool program. In its K-12 schools, Utah spends

just $6,252 per student, which is less than any other state and two-thirds of

the national average.

“We want to reach the greatest number of children with the resources that we

have,” Stephenson said. “I don’t think we’re being cheap at all. We’re being

smart.”

Called Upstart — or Utah Preparing Students Today for a Rewarding Tomorrow —

the program has grown quickly since its inception(开始) in 2008, bolstered(支持，援助)

by external evaluations that have shown early literacy(读写能力)gains among children

who use it. (从2008年开展以来，该课程发展迅速，而且也得到了外部评估的支持：使用该课程的孩子已经初步显示出读写能力的提高。)It is a

program of the Waterford Institute, a Utah-based nonprofit center that has long

sold instructional software to K-12 schools.

Upstart will cost about $5.3 million this year, or about $800 per student.

That is about half the cost of Arizona’s state-funded traditional preschool

program, which is the least-expensive in the country, and a fraction(分数;一小部分)of

Washington’s universal preschool program, which costs $15,000 per student,

according to Barnett’s early education research center at Rutgers.

Waterford provides participating families with software and parent training

sessions and, if need be, laptops and Internet access. The nonprofit also has

installed solar panels for several students whose homes do not have electricity,

including for the Parrish family, who live in the Navajo Nation’s iconic(标志性的)

Monument Valley.

“I would recommend it to other parents,” said Clara Parrish, whose

granddaughter began Upstart last year while attending a traditional preschool

for two half-days each week. “She was a little behind, and then when she went to

Upstart, she caught up. I think she’s doing better than she was.”

Public preschool programs have been expanding nationwide as policymakers have

come to see early-childhood education as key to closing persistent achievement

gaps between children from poor and affluent(富裕的)families.

(公立学前课程已经在全国范围内发展起来，因为政府已逐渐认识到，孩子的早期教育是消除一直存在的穷人家和富人家孩子成绩差距的关键所在。)Research shows

that at-risk children who attend high-quality preschools are more likely to have

positive life outcomes than their counterparts(对等的人或物)who do not attend

preschool. They are more likely to graduate from high school and less likely to

get into trouble with the law or to go to jail.

But Barnett and other earyl-education experts said that those powerful

effects stem not only from(来自于) the academic boost(提高)that preschools can

provide but also from the social and emotional skills — such as self-control —

that young children learn when they play and negotiate with their peers in

person.

It is not clear whether or how an online learning program can teach those

kinds of skills; evaluations of Upstart have not measured what children learn in

that realm(领域).

“They’ve selected their outcomes that they are likely to achieve, and it’s

probably safe to assume that impacts on the others are zero,” Barnett said.

(巴内特说：“他们只选择那些可能实现的结果，我们也许可以认为，[该课程]对其他方面产生的影响可能为零。”)

Claudia Miner, a Waterford vice president, said Upstart officials teach

parents how they can bolster their children’s social skills. But she said that

lawmakers are most interested in the program’s potential effect on literacy.

“You don’t measure social skills in third grade; you measure reading skills,”

she said in an e-mail.

Miner added that some parents simply are not ready to send their 4-year-olds

to school, but they also want help to prepare them for kindergarten. And other

families, particularly in Utah, live in such far-flung(偏远的)places that sending

their children to a traditional preschool is not realistic or affordable.