Do Parents and Teachers Agree? : What "Should" Young Children Be Learning? / Patricia P. Olmsted and Shannon Lockhard.

A study compared how parents and teachers in the United States, Hong Kong, Nigeria, and Poland ranked in order of importance a list of 8 skills categories for 4-year-olds to learn in preschool. The categories were language skills, motor/physical skills, pre-academic skills, self-assessment skills, self-expression skills, social skills with adults, social skills with children, and self-sufficiency skills. Surveys of teachers and parents in each of the four countries found that teachers in the United States generally ranked social skills with peers as most important, teachers in Nigeria ranked pre-academic skills as first, teachers in Poland ranked motor/physical skills as first, while teachers in Hong Kong ranked self-sufficiency and language skills tied for first place. The study also found that parents in Hong Kong and Nigeria ranked pre-academic skills as first, while parents in the United States and Poland ranked social skills with peers as first. (MDM)

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