Research

One of our favorite reads here at Early Ed Watch is AFT's American Educator--a great quarterly magazine on education that, if you're not currently reading, you should be. In recent years, American Educator has featured numerous articles relevant to early education--including a sobering analysis highlighting the poor quality of state standards for K-2 earlier this year, E.D. Hirsch on the importance of developing vocabulary and content knowledge for warding off the fourth grade slump in reading scores, and a terrific 2004 issue that focused on preventing early reading difficulties.

Tomorrow afternoon in Bergamo, Italy, I will be moderating a breakout session on Design for Savings at the Boulder Bergamo Forum on Access to Financial Services: Expanding the Rural Frontier.   The organizers have set up a Wiki to allow those who couldn't make it to Bergamo to still participate in the session. 

Last month the Institute of Education Sciences released a major new study that evaluates the impact of 14 common pre-kindergarten curricula on pre-k students’ learning and pre-k classroom quality. Results suggest that some pre-k curricula are more effective than others in improving children’s literacy and math skills.

Pre-kindergarten experts generally agree that high-quality pre-k programs must have a clearly articulated curriculum that guides instruction and spells out expectations for what children will learn over the course of the year. They also tend to agree that good pre-k curriculum should be comprehensive—developing children’s literacy, language, early math, and social and emotional skills. And, as we’ve previously argued, good pre-k curriculum should be aligned with the curriculum that will be used in kindergarten and early elementary grades.

A new study by economists David Deming and Susan Dynarski suggests that the trend towards delaying children's entrance into kindergarten (commonly known as kindergarten redshirting) may be partially to blame for the stagnation in higher education attainment for American youth:

I don't often agree with Richard Whitmire*, but I do enjoy reading his new-ish blog, "Why Boys Fail?" Richard is smarter, more honest, and more data-driven than most other proponents of the current "boy crisis" storyline, and to the extent that the boy crisis has a kernel of truth to it--and it does, particularly for poor and minority boys--he's one of the more thoughtful people investigating that.

But this post he recently ran, by University of Alaska-Fairbanks Professor (and noted boy crisis hysteric) Judith Kleinfeld, makes no sense whatsoever. Like many "boy crisis" promoters, Kleinfeld believes many boys are not developmentally ready to enter school or begin learning to read at age five, and that this is one reason boys tend to lag girls in reading achievement. Kleinfeld has proposed delaying boys' entry into kindergarten as one potential strategy to address the literacy gap. She notes that the practice, known as "kindergarten redshirting," is common among affluent, white parents, and suggests that poor and minority boys, whose parents are much less likely to redshirt, would do better if they were held back from kindergarten too.

Then she does something really wierd.

Cato's Adam Schaeffer, responding to a post I wrote two week ago, has more--lots more--to say about pre-k effectiveness (or, from his point of view, the lack thereof). Before we start talking about the evidence on pre-k more generally, though—which is the real bone of contention here, right?—let’s close out the debate that started this: Do trends in Oklahoma’s NAEP scores since the early 1990s indicate that the state’s pre-k program is ineffective? My answer is still “no.”

Early Ed Watch is at Head Start's 9th National Research Conference this morning, and as long as our wifi connection holds up, we'll be bringing you live coverage of what we hear and learn here. This morning's keynote session features UNC-Chapel Hill's Peg Burchinal and UVA's Robert Pianta discussing "Competencies and Credentials for Early Childhood Educators: What Do We Know and What Do We Need to Know?" Relevant background reading here.

8:50: The Office of Head Start's Patricia Brown discusses the Office's implementation of the recent Head Start reauthorization, and the importance of research in supporting that reauthorization, in light of that legislation's emphasis on scientifically based practice.

8:53: SRCD Executive Director Lonnie Sherrod notes that this conference starts very early in the morning (there's a session at 7 AM tomorrow). Sherrod notes that Head Start, unlike many other federal programs, was created with active involvement from child development experts, establishing a unique relationship between the Head Start program and the early childhood research community.

Researchers in the Netherlands studied the impact of mental health home visitors on depressed mothers and their infants:

This study examined the effect of a mother–baby intervention on the quality of mother–child interaction, infant–mother attachment security, and infant socioemotional functioning in a group of depressed mothers with infants aged 1–12 months. A randomized controlled trial compared an experimental group (n = 35) receiving the intervention (8–10 home visits) with a control group (n = 36) receiving parenting support by telephone. There were assessments pre, post, and follow-up after 6 months. The intervention had positive effects on the quality of mother–infant interaction. Infants in the experimental group had higher scores for attachment security and for one aspect of socioemotional functioning, namely, competence. The intervention proved successful in preventing deterioration of the quality of mother–child interaction.

 

 

 

 

More evidence on the importance of teacher-child interactions to early education quality:

This study examined development of academic, language, and social skills among 4-year-olds in publicly supported prekindergarten (pre-K) programs in relation to 3 methods of measuring pre-K quality, which are as follows: (a) adherence to 9 standards of quality related to program infrastructure and design, (b) observations of the overall quality of classroom environments, and (c) observations of teachers’ emotional and instructional interactions with children in classrooms. Participants were 2,439 children enrolled in 671 pre-K classrooms in 11 states. Adjusting for prior skill levels, child and family characteristics, program characteristics, and state, teachers’ instructional interactions predicted academic and language skills and teachers’ emotional interactions predicted teacher-reported social skills. Findings suggest that policies, program development, and professional development efforts that improve teacher–child interactions can facilitate children’s school readiness.

Two new studies released this week aim to help policymakers make sound choices about early education investments.

In Meaningful Investments In Pre-k, researchers from the Institute for Women’s Policy Research estimate what it actually costs to provide quality pre-k programs. To estimate the costs of quality pre-k programs, the IWPR researchers identified the characteristics of high-quality pre-k programs—qualified teachers, small class sizes, appropriate educational materials, and so on—and arrived at research-based estimates of what it actually costs, on a per-child basis, to provide those things. They also estimated the cost of appropriate facilities and of state-level support and oversight infrastructure needed to ensure pre-k quality.