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Danielle S. McNamara, Ph.D., is a Professor of Psychology in the Psychology Department and Senior Scientist in the Institute for the Science of Teaching and Learning at Arizona State University. Her academic background includes a Linguistics B.A. (1982), a Clinical Psychology M.S. (1989), and a Cognitive Psychology Ph.D. (1992). She is an international expert in the fields of cognitive and learning sciences, comprehension, literacy, writing, natural language processing, and intelligent tutoring systems. She develops educational technologies and conducts research to better understand cognitive processes involved in comprehension, knowledge and skill acquisition, and writing. Her research also involves the development and assessment of game-based intelligent tutoring systems (e.g., Writing Pal, iSTART) and natural language processing (NLP) tools (e.g., Coh-Metrix, SÉANCE, CRAT, TAACO, the Writing Assessment Tool). Two of her projects, the Writing Pal and iSTART, are computer assisted learning programs designed to improve students’ writing and reading comprehension. Much of Dr. McNamara’s research employs computational linguistic as a means of analyzing discourse. Such tools allow for quick, efficient, and reliable analyses of large corpuses of text, which is particularly relevant and valuable when analyzing big data. More information about her research is available at soletlab.com.
Proposals for universal preschool and all-day kindergarten are an increasingly popular policy solution for everything from low academic achievement, to reducing crime, to lowering the dropout rate. In summer 2005, a national task force co-chaired by Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano called for $8 billion annually in federal support for preschool. California and Arizona are leading the charge toward universal preschool and full-day kindergarten. California may become the national prototype for universal preschool.
To help determine the efficacy of early education programs, we examine the results of some of the programs considered to be early education models—including, Perry Preschool, Chicago Child Parent Studies, Abecedarian, and Head Start—and find the research to be flawed and therefore of questionable value. We also review information from the National Center for Education Statistics, which reports no lasting reading, math, or science achievement differences between children who attend half-day and full-day kindergarten. We also examine the results of the National Assessment of Education Progress in Georgia and Oklahoma, where universal preschool has been fully implemented without quantifiable benefit. We find the widespread adoption of preschool and full-day kindergarten is unlikely to improve student achievement.
