Purpose

It is a priority of national importance, to promote the readiness to learn of the children.

Many children, however, are being raised in homes that are harmful to them physically,
mentally, emotionally, and are not conducive to learning. Poorer children, also often live in
densely populated areas, and are susceptible to community violence, poor healthcare, and lack of
appropriate housing. Many programs have been instated to help combat the lack of access to
education; the most prominent of these is Head Start. The architects of these programs are
guided by developmental-ecological theory; the theory states the importance of children having
access to age appropriate competencies.
Peer relationships are crucial in a childs early years, and help set the foundation for
future relationships of the child. Children also have individual learning styles, which are unique
to each child; some behaviors are: initiative, attentiveness, and openness to new challenges. The
purpose of this research is to help form a clearer picture of the relationship between academic
success and peer relationships, in regard to the economic status of minority children. The
working hypothesis is that positive play interactions will correlate positively with academic
success. Negative play interactions are also expected to correlate negatively with academic
success. Withdrawn peer behavior is expected to correlate positively with passive classroom
behavior, and negatively with learning behaviors.
Method/Procedure
The participants, 556 preschool children, were recruited from a large Head Start program
based in the northeast United States. The ages of the children ranged from three to four years of
age. The ethnicity of the group was 87% African American, 9% European American, 3%
Hispanic, and 1% Asian and other groups. Gender was close to even, with 51% boys, and 49%
girls. Several different measures were used in the course of this study. The PIPPS is a 32-item
teacher rating scale, used to measure students interactive peer play. The PLBS is a 29-item
teacher report measure of childrens learning behavior; it is used to identify successful and faulty
learning patterns. The CTRS-28 includes three sub-scales used to characterize patterns of
troublesome child behavior. The study was a survey that had teachers and students complete the
corresponding forms. The surveys were conducted at the Head Start facilities. To test the
significance of the relationships between peer play behaviors, and learning behaviors, and
behavior problems canonical variance and redundancy analysis were conducted.
Results