Effects of Culture on Kindergarten Readiness

The increasing tendency of the American education system to flood society with high school graduates possessing questionable academic skills, together with increasing demands for such skills by institutions of higher education, employers, and society generally cause (a) many parents to push their children into academically challenging endeavors at every earlier ages, (b) many educators to seek strategies that minimize adverse exposure to accountability standards, and (c) many children to continue to flounder in the American educational system (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, 2004). Increasing diversity in the American population compounds these issues and outcomes as the dichotomies between the cultural backgrounds of children entering the educational system and cultural norms underlying American educators and school systems in the United States increase.

There is a multiplicity of points of intersection involving the issues affecting outcomes in the American educational system. One such intersection that is gaining in prominence is the issue of kindergarten readiness. Many parents, in an effort to enhance the chances that a child will excel academically, push for early (chronologically) entry into kindergarten. At the same time, many educators and school systems, in efforts to avoid sanctions related to the No Child Left Behind Program, increasingly a

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between people as an interpsychological category, and then within the child as an intrapsychological category. This is equally true with regard to involuntary attention, logical memory, the formation of concepts, the development of volition. (p. 163) Vygotsky's (1981) concept of semiotic mediation involves three basic elements: an account of the historical, social-institutional, and cultural settings of a society; an analysis of the semiotic mediation that reflects and constitutes this setting; and an account of the intrapsychological correlates that derive from mastering the forms of semiotic mediation. In part, the cognitive development theories of Piaget and Vygotsky may "be viewed as providing distinctive but generally complementary accounts of the development processes with different methodologies and a different scope of explanation" (Zimmerman, 1993, p. 83). The two sets of theory share several fundamental premises. One problem with Piaget's theory is that, although the theory is "offered as universal", the theory cannot "be replicated among children of all cultures" (Dasen, 1994, 68). Piaget's theory requires individual accommodation to an existing system for comprehending the world, a process that ultimately limits
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Approximate Word count = 3710
Approximate Pages = 15 (250 words per page)

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