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Introduction

Address by Grover J. (Russ) Whitehurst, Assistant Secretary, Educational Research and Improvement, U.S. Department of Education, at the White House Summit on Early Childhood Cognitive Development

July 26, 2001

Good day. I am very pleased to be able to talk with you about cognitive development in the preschool period. I am very appreciative of the First Lady's and the President's commitment to this issue.

My task is to provide a brief introduction to the science that relates to this topic and that undergirds many of the presentations you will hear at this conference. I was asked to do this before I became Assistant Secretary, and will be speaking in the guise of a researcher who has worked on this general topic for 31 years. This is my last gasp in that role. If I have to sing a swan song, I guess this isn't a bad setting in which to do it.

One of my early mentors told me that in giving a speech I should tell the audience what I'm going to say, say it, and then tell them what I said. I'll follow that advice today.

I'm going to focus on pre-reading skills that children acquire in the preschool period, and how these skills, or the absence of them, affect a child's later ability to learn to read. In introducing this topic, I'm going to tell you why learning to read is important and why this task is difficult for children. Then I'll describe important pre-reading abilities. Next I'll describe the influence of economic poverty on the development of pre-reading abilities. Then I'll describe some research that demonstrates the predictive power of pre-reading abilities for later reading outcomes. And finally, I will describe three interventions that enhance pre-reading skills, each targeted for a different time span during the preschool period.

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