Studies Shed Light on Teaching Immigrant Preschoolers

Conference at Princeton spotlights new findings

Princeton, N.J.

A growing number of studies are providing guidance to school districts that are increasingly looking for ways to support preschoolers from immigrant families so that they are ready for kindergarten.

Recent findings from that growing body of work—including studies that examine the effectiveness of tools for measuring preliteracy, explore immigrant preschoolers’ access to early-childhood education, and analyze how immigrant children measure up with their nonimmigrant peers upon entering kindergarten—were presented here last month at a conference held in tandem with the release of a special issue on immigrant children in the journal Future of Children . The event, at Princeton University, drew nearly 200 educators.

While the term “immigrant children” can be interpreted in different ways, experts at the April 29 conference defined it to include any child under age 18 living in the United States with at least one parent born in a foreign country. Currently such children account for a quarter of the nation’s 75 million children. The well-documented academic disparities between many immigrant children and their peers in high school are rooted in early-childhood education, said Robert Crosnoe, a sociology professor at the University...