今天，雅思君要和大家分享的這篇文章叫“Does online preschool program work?”大家注意，這里的work是翻譯成奏效的意思，而不是工作的意思。在線的學前教育有效嗎？這是一個值得思考的問題，現在的家長都有自己的工作，小朋友上課下課去學校也不方便，所以今天就一起來談談在線學前教育那些事兒吧！

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(試點項目).

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.(這也給了那些上小學前原本可能沒有任何準備的孩子一個機會來體驗學習課程。) 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. (猶他州的辦法，雖然比傳統學前方案便宜得多，而且能惠及該州最偏遠地區的學生，但是在一些批評家看來，這種方法恰恰體現了一個常見的問題：為政者想利用孩子早期教育被經常吹噓的種種好處，卻又投資不夠以確保其品質。)

“It’s wishful thinking(異想天開) 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(開始) in 2008, bolstered(支持，援助) by external evaluations that have shown early literacy(讀寫能力)gains among children who use it. (從2008年開展以來，該課程發展迅速，而且也得到了外部評估的支持：使用該課程的孩子已經初步顯示出讀寫能力的提高。)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(分數;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(標志性的) 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. (公立學前課程已經在全國范圍內發展起來，因為政府已逐漸認識到，孩子的早期教育是消除一直存在的窮人家和富人家孩子成績差距的關鍵所在。)Research shows that at-risk children who attend high-quality preschools are more likely to have positive life outcomes than their counterparts(對等的人或物)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(來自于) 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(領域).

“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. (巴內特說：“他們只選擇那些可能實現的結果，我們也許可以認為，[該課程]對其他方面產生的影響可能為零。”)

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(偏遠的)places that sending their children to a traditional preschool is not realistic or affordable.

               
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