Early Intervention With At-Risk Hispanic Students: Effectiveness of the Piacceleration Program in Developing Piagetian Intellectual Processes

AbstractAn experiment was performed to determine the effects of instruction in the Piacceleration program (PXL) on Hispanic Head Start students’ acquisition of Piagetian skills. The PXL is a hands-on, mastery-based program designed to systematically instruct children in the Piagetian skills of classification, seriation, and conservation. The PXL group performed significantly better than the control group on posttest measures of classification of objects by form, size, and orientation, and on measures of general classification and seriation. The two groups did not differ significantly on a posttest measure of intelligence, the Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scale of Intelligence-Revised (WPPSI-R). The participants who achieved concept mastery, however, performed significantly better than their nonmastery peers on the WPPSI-R Full scale.