Chicago Loangitudinal Study - Essay Example

The Chicago Longitudinal Study The Chicago Longitudinal Study aimed at investigating educational and social development of low income, same-age children when they were made to study in Chicago Public Schools through government funding. Majority of them (93%) were from single community, namely African American and belonged to economically deprived class in central-city of Chicago.Child-Parent Center (CPC) program, which began in 1967, was the first intervention by government to support economically deprived class of children.

It aimed at facilitating parent involvement in children education from preschool to third grade.The study can be termed as a prospective cohort study for the simple reason that study was followed up over a period of time for the children with the similar demographic characteristics. Their educational and psychosocial outcomes were observed with input of certain programs and policy intervention schemes. The Chicago Longitudinal Study had four major goal settings:1. Their school performance and social development were documented throughout the school-age years.

This included their achievement in schools, change in attitudes, and psychosocial development.2. To measure the effects of Child-Parent Center participation on child and youth development.3. To understand how early childhood experiences were manifested into behavioral and scholastic development.4. To understand how program and policy interventions contributed in children’s education and social development preventing their learning difficulties to bring about positive outcomes.Several studies were carried out to address the above goals.

The study did inform that higher participation in the child-Parent center program resulted into higher level of school achievement, higher parent participation, and lower rates of school dropout and so on.Programs and policy interventions were used as manipulative or independent variables to measure its impact on behavior and psychosocial outcome along with children’s increasing capacity to lessen their learning difficulties. Family, school-related many individual factors were used to measure child’s development, their social behavior patterns along with attitudinal differences starting from the early days and then throughout the school-age years.

Such intensive study was never conducted ever before in the history. A great deal of information was collected and examined through class room adjustment, parent participation, special education placement. Educational expectations of all concerned especially students and parents were also understood with altered programs and policy interventions as an independent variable.All children under study were born in 1980 and belonged to the same community and geographical location. So in a sense it was not only a longitudinal but a detailed cohort study giving a lot of insight on their response characteristics.

Data from table 1 clearly reveals that impact of government intervention programs on children’s educational achievement was considerable, when sample characteristics of ‘CPC Preschool’ and ‘No CPC Preschool groups’ are compared in reference to the original and age 14 samples. ‘CPC Preschool’ children outsmarts ‘No CPC Preschool’ group in development with a good percentage margin.The study informed that girls, which were about 50 percent in the original sample, did increase by about 1.

5 percentage point in the sample size at age 14. In that sense, it is a positive outcome so far girls’ development is concerned.We can conclude that government’s program and policy intervention schemes did bring about social and educational development among the economically backward class of children.Reference:Reynolds Arthur J. (1991, 1999); Reynolds, Bezruczko,Hagemann, (1997) The Chicago Longitudinal Study