Understanding the HighScope Approach

Early Years Education in Practice

Monica Wiltshire

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781351234085
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Understanding the HighScope Approach is a much-needed source of information for those wishing to extend and consolidate their understanding of this innovative education programme. It will enable the reader to analyse the essential elements of the HighScope approach to early childhood and its relationship to high-quality early years practice.

This second edition contains all the original content, which covers all areas of the curriculum including learning environment, plan-do-review, adult-child interaction and assessment, but has been updated to be fully in line with the latest changes to research, policy and practice. New topics and features include:

? outdoor play and learning

? using the HighScope approach with children with special needs and who speak English as an additional language

? managing the approach with bigger class sizes

??the implementation of technology with children in HighScope settings

? a selection of new photographs

Written to support the work of all those in the field of early years education and childcare, this is a vital text for students, early years and childcare practitioners, teachers, early years professionals, children's centre professionals, lecturers, advisory teachers, head teachers and setting managers.

1 History and research

This chapter starts by explaining how HighScope got its name. It then tells the story of how HighScope grew, from the problems of 1960s segregated society in America to becoming an international approach. It describes the research-based evidence in support of the HighScope curriculum, its theoretical influences, underlying educational philosophy and the components of high-quality children’s programmes derived from these studies. Finally, it explains why HighScope works and its impact more than 50 years on. The publications that have tracked its development are included in the related reading section at the end of the chapter.

How HighScope got its name

Originally called ‘The Cognitively Oriented Curriculum’, HighScope got its name from a summer camp for adolescents in 1963 in Michigan, USA; ‘high’ to signify their aspiration level and ‘scope’ to signify the breadth of vision they hoped to reach. When David Weikart, the founder of HighScope, left his job as Director of Special Services in 1970 to focus on research and curriculum development, the name was adopted for the corporate name HighScope Educational Research Foundation. The work of the foundation has expanded and evolved and now includes departments that carry out an active programme of research to evaluate HighScope programmes and other educational initiatives; curriculum development; and professional development training and conferences. HighScope also operates a Demonstration Preschool to showcase the curriculum in practice, and the HighScope Press, which publishes curriculum, training and assessment materials. Although HighScope’s principal work is in early childhood education, it also offers validated assessment tools and related training in early elementary education and programmes for adolescents. An international registry maintains a list of certified individuals and accredited settings that have participated in HighScope training and met the rigorous standards for curriculum knowledge and practitioner skills.

Origins and research

David Weikart

In 1962, clinical psychologist Dr David P. Weikart (1931–2003), Director of Special Services for the Ypsilanti Public Schools in Michigan, initiated the Perry Preschool Project (which later became known as the HighScope Perry Preschool Study). He designed this project in response to the persistent failure of students from Ypsilanti’s poorest neighbourhoods to graduate from high school.

After four years at Oberlin College, a two-year tour of duty with the US Marine Corps in Korea and Japan and three years of graduate studies at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Weikart was eager to enter the workforce and make a contribution to society. In his role as a school psychologist and director of special services he was new on the scene and the first person to hold this position under new state funding. He was alarmed by the trends he found in educational achievement and to be working in a context where most people felt that IQ was a genetic trait and that one could assign a youngster’s IQ with fair accuracy simply by knowing the address of the family. Over the previous ten years of standardised achievement testing (1948–1957), no class in the Perry elementary school, a predominantly African American school, ever exceeded the 10th percentile on national norms for any tested subject. Yet in the elementary school on the other side of town, which primarily served the children of white, middle-class university professionals, no class ever scored less than the 90th percentile (Weikart, 2004).

Perry Preschool Project

Although the HighScope approach is now used in settings serving the full range of preschool-aged children, it was originally developed to serve at-risk children from poor neighbourhoods in Ypsilanti. This area experienced racial segregation in 1960s America. There were overwhelming educational problems, including 50 per cent of children under 10 years old repeating a year, less than half the children graduating from high school, a high ratio of juvenile delinquency and low test scores and academic standing.

In searching for a solution to these problems Weikart and his colleagues focused on preschool education for 3- and 4-year-olds because they knew from research emerging at the time that the potential for learning at this age was strong and wondered if there was something they could do before children started school that would better equip them. This decision also avoided the complexity of district-wide school reform because provision for this age group was non-statutory. To provide programme structure, the Special Services committee considered using the standard nursery school approach of the day, which focused on children’s social and emotional development (Sears and Dowley, 1963), but subsequently decided they must focus more squarely on children’s intellectual development to support children’s future academic growth. Because a systematic and documented approach to these cognitive components of preschool education did not exist at that time, the Special Services committee consulted several outside experts who were university professors in child development and special education. After reviewing the proposals, the basic advice from the experts was not to operate the programme. They felt that 3- and 4-year-olds, especially from disadvantaged backgrounds, would not cope with a cognitively oriented curriculum and that it might actually harm the children. Whilst initially this was disappointing advice, Weikart and his colleagues realised that these experts had unknowingly given them a legitimate research question: Does participation by disadvantaged children in an early education programme improve their intellectual and academic abilities? Or, to put it simply, does preschool work? With this challenging question to be answered, the HighScope Perry Preschool Study was conceived as a tightly designed research project that would compare two groups of children randomly assigned to treatment (preschool) and control (no preschool) conditions.

Politically, the early 1960s was a period of optimism about ‘breaking the cycle of poverty’ and ‘inoculating’ children against failure. Despite this, it was a bold step to take when research was not part of the Special Services remit and there was no obvious funding for a year of the programme, let alone four decades. It was also ‘of a time’ because it would not be ethical now to withhold preschool experiences from a control group of children, but at that time there was a genuine lack of knowledge about the benefits of preschool education.

Background to the project

The Special Services committee set three criteria for the preschool curriculum they would select. First, it had to be based on a coherent theory of teaching and learning. Second, it had to support each child’s capacity to develop individual talents and abilities through on-going opportunities for active learning. Third, researchers and teachers had to be able to work as partners so that theory and practice received equal consideration. The preschool programme that was the subject of the study served 3- and 4-year-olds from 1962 to 1967.

Theoretical influences

With these criteria firmly in mind, Weikart, along with teachers, administrators and psychologists, turned to the writings of Jean Piaget. They were initially drawn to Piaget’s child development research by a summary of his work presented in Intelligence and Experience by J. McVicker Hunt (1961). Clearly, Piaget’s theory of development supported the curriculum team’s philosophical orientation towards active learning. Through a series of seminars and discussions the team began the work of building a classroom programme for 3- and 4-year-olds around processes, goals and content areas derived from Piaget’s research. Gradually, however, a major decision affecting project organisation and curriculum development was forced by staff differences. Several researchers who were Piagetian scholars began to outline weekly lesson plans for the teachers, including correct and incorrect ways to...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Introduction
• 1 History and research
• 2 An overview of HighScope
• 3 Active learning
• 4 The learning environment
• 5 The daily routine
• 6 Adult—child interaction
• 7 Assessment and teamwork
• 8 The future
• Index